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fete BS TANCK OF GOTHIC 


BOOKS BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM 


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Copyright, 1017 
By MarsHaL_ JONES COMPANY 


All rights reserved 


— 


Published September, 1917 
Second Edition, 1925 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 


In the Preface to the first edition of this 
book I spoke of the superficial nature of the 
first approach to Medievalism when, early 
in the XI Xth century it was in a sense 
rediscovered after the long oblivion of the 
Renaissance and the early modernism which 
was its logical derivative, and expressed 
the conviction that “it has needed this War 
(the Preface was dated August 4, 1917) to 
drive men back and beyond the form to 
the matter itself, and to give them some 
realization of the singular force and potency 
and righteousness of an epoch which begins 
now to show itself as the best man has 
ever created, and one as well that contains 
within itself the solution of our manifold 
and tragical difficulties, and is in fact the 
model whereon we must rebuild the fabric 
of a destroyed culture and civilization.” 

Many of the hopes, and some of the 
aspirations, engendered by the War then in 
process have vanished with its terrors and 
faded with its griefs, but there are more 


Boe 


PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 


now than then, I think, who would admit 
that the old pre-war culture and civiliza- 
tion have been effectively destroyed, and 
while there are indeed very few concrete 
examples of any first steps towards an actual 
rebuilding (rather the reverse is probably 
the case) there is nevertheless a very power- 
ful and widespread spiritual change taking 
place which augurs well, for it is just this 
spiritual and psychological movement which 
must precede all vital and enduring reforms 
in the material sphere. 

It is not alone that Universities and 
other places of higher learning are adding 
or strengthening their departments of Me- 
dieval philosophy and history and litera- 
ture, nor that the doctrines, devotions and 
practices of the Medieval Church are com- 
ing more fully into favour (and in the most 
unexpected and Protestant places), still less 
is it that the fashion for Medizval archi- 
tecture, music, ceremonial and the other 
allied arts are becoming almost a mania. 
Even the remarkable recrudescence of Me- 
dieval ideas and the attempted restoration 
of Medieval methods in industry and social 
relations, as exemplified by the English 
propaganda for guild principles and guild 

[vi ] 


PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 


practice, is not to me the most significant 
evidence of the revolution that is taking 
place. It is rather the general change in 
orientation that is manifesting itself so 
clearly and so curiously and in places as 
wholly separated as Germany, India and 
the United States. Confidence in the final- 
ity of XI Xth century standards and judg- 
ments has almost completely disappeared 
and everywhere there is a searching for new 
methods, new principles, a search that has— 
perhaps temporary—issue in such widely 
different phenomena as Russian Bolshevism, 
Italian Fascism, the Spanish Directorate 
and the revolt of Mahatma Ghandi, the re- 
crudescence of American Puritanism, and 
the neo-Catholicism and Medizval reaction 
in Germany. 

Varied as are these diverse movements, 
ranging as they do over the whole gamut 
that stretches from infamy or absurdity to 
the noblest exaltation, they yet have one 
thing in common and that is a total rejec- 
tion of the dogmas and shibboleths of 
XIXth century scientific and philosophical 
determinism, while, with the exception of 
the Bolshevism of Russia and the Puritan- 
ism of Amercia they do all reach back with 


[ vu | 


PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 


unerring instinct to some aspect of Media- 
valism. It is true to say that never since 
the Renaissance has there been a more 
instinctive and almost universal return for 
light and leadership to an antecedent epoch, 
and where then the return was consciously 
to a fancied Classicism so now it is half 
unconsciously to the reality of the Middle 
Ages. 

There are great elements of hopefulness 
in this return. The XIXth century and 
the first fourteen years of the present form 
a period of perfectly clear individuality. 
It was in the first place a time where all 
the dominant factors in the XVIIIth cen- 
tury were being reversed and its dogmas 
and institutions destroyed, and in the sec- 
ond place it was a time of intense speciali- 
zation and therefore of exaggeration and 
the consequent loss of all sense of just bal- 
ance and proportion. Out of the Renais- 
sance had come a vigourous and autocratic 
aristocracy, a selective system which re- 
sulted in an organism of caste and privilege 
which held complete sway in all categories 
of life, political, social, ecclesiastical, indus- 
trial, intellectual. The result was powerful 
leadership and an organic scheme of life 


[ viii ] 


PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 


that functioned most effectively and by 
no means wholly without beneficence. As 
Count Kayserling says, “‘In far-sightedness 
and ability to rule and govern, on the other 
hand, the aristocrat always has the advan- 
tage of the plebeian. He alone stands above 
every party by nature, is without resent- 
ment of any kind, only he has a purely 
objective relation to the weaknesses of men, 
for the very reason that he rarely suffers 
subjectively from these influences, and for 
this reason he excels, where it is a question 
of considering men as a whole and doing 
justice to their collective needs, even the 
more talented individual of low extrac- 
tion.” Unfortunately this development of 
the aristocratic, or selective, spirit, and its 
imposition, synchronized with a general 
abandonment (on the part of the peoples 
then in control) of the Catholic religion and 
philosophy of the antecedent epoch, with 
a corresponding substitution of the mislead- 
ing theories and doctrines of Protestantism, 
and therefore there was lacking that reli- 
able standard of comparative values that 
might have directed such a movement and 
made it wholly beneficent. When, towards 
the end of the XVIIIth century, the domi- 


[ ix ] 


PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 


nant system began to develop its own nem- 
esis, Protestantism, industrialism and 
democracy acted together to break down 
the aristocratic régime and to bring in that 
quality of specialization which still further, 
and at last successfully, weakened the old 
system to a point where it ceased to com- 
mand, and finally gave place to the omnipo- 
tent but fatally unbalanced order which 
met its own downfall in the war it had 
engendered and the ensuing peace which 
was even more fatal in its results. 

As a realization of this sequence of events 
and their significance is borne in on the 
human consciousness it is natural that men 
should revert to that earlier time which 
died that modernism might live, in the in- 
stinctive feeling that here perhaps may be 
found, preserved “in escrow” the truths 
and even the methods through the lack of 
which we of the present day have suffered. 
It was to fortify this belief and to aid this 
quest (even in a very minor degree) that 
these lectures were originally prepared, for, 
believing as I do that through art in its va- 
rious forms one may approach more closely 
to the realities of the time that gave it 
birth than through “original documents” 


Lx] 


PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 


and contemporary chronicles and formal 
histories, I felt that a traversable road might 
be found through the great architecture of 
the Middle Ages. To these original lectures 
have now been added a few illustrations, 
since persuasion and conviction may come 
as convincingly through the senses as 
through the intellectual process, and also a 
later essay on the essential spirit of the 
Middle Ages (published in The Forum for 
April 1925) which may perhaps enforce 
some of the points I attempted to make in 
the lectures themselves. 

As for the content of these papers, there 
is, I think, nothing essential that I should 
change, although I should now give much 
more space to the Spanish artistic voicing 
of the spirit of the Middle Ages. It is with 
a certain sense of humiliation that I have 
to admit that when these Lowell Lectures 
were delivered I had never passed the Pyre- 
nees into the Iberian Peninsula. Since then 
the fault has been rectified and I do now 
wish to cry “peccavi!”’ over my own sin of 
omission, to confess my own presumption 
in thinking I could write about Gothic 
without knowing Spain, and to warn others 
against falling into my own grievous error. 


[ xi | 


PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 


There is in Spanish Gothic (indeed in 
Spanish civilization itself, both past and 
present) an added and most illuminating 
commentary on Medizvalism and one which 
cannot be ignored. Speaking specifically of 
architecture, | do not so much mean the 
pseudo-French Gothic of Toledo, Leon and 
Burgos (the latter completely re-cast at a 
later date in a purely Spanish spirit) as I 
do the wholly Iberian schools of Cataluna 
in the XIVth century with the vital and 
original work of Jayme Fabra and his dis- 
ciples, of the XVIth century work at Sego- 
via and Salamanca of Juan and Roderigo 
Gil de Hontafion, the “Manoelino”’ marvels 
of Portugal (notably the church of Belem) 
and above all the Cathedral of Seville which 
I can only hold to be the noblest interior 
ever created by man. In all these, and 
more besides, Spain makes her own wonder- 
ful contribution to the great revelation of 
the spirit and character of the Middle Ages, 
and no man (least of all myself) should 
presume either to estimate their art or value 
their nature without knowledge thereof. 

To the partial list of books suggested for 
collateral reading, I should now add a few 
new titles: amongst these would be “The 


[ xu ] 


PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 


Broad Stone of Honour”’ by Kenelm Digby 
(carelessly omitted from the original list) 
“Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle 
Ages”’ (Princeton University Press), and “A 
History of Medieval Philosophy” (Long- 
mans & Co.) both by Professor Maurice de 
Wulf, “A History of Medieval Europe,’’ by 
Lynn Thorndike (Houghton, Mifflin Co.) 
“A Guildsman’s Interpretation of History”’ 
(Sunrise Turn Inc.) “Old Worlds for New” 
(Geo. Allen & Unwin) and “Post Indus- 
trialism’’ (Macmillan Co.) all by Arthur 
Penty, “Romanesque Sculpture of the Pil- 
grimage Roads” (Marshall Jones Co.) by 
Arthur Kingsley Porter, “The Soul of 
Spain’”’ (Houghton, Mifflin Co.) by Have- 
lock Ellis, and “‘Form Problems of the 
Gothic” (J. Stechert) by A. Worringer. 
Those who are interested in the application 
of Medieval principles to the revived art 
of ecclesiastical architecture will find a 
fairly comprehensive account in the last 
edition of my “Church Building” (Marshall 
Jones Co.). 
RALPH ADAMS CRAM 


WHITEHALL, SUDBURY, 
MASSACHUSETTS, 
23rd August, 1925. 


[ xiii J 








PREFACE 


IN philosophical terminology every exist- 
ing thing is composed of substance and acci- 
dents, the first being its essential quality, the 
second its visible form. Accidents may 
change while the substance remains immu- 
table, and the substance may change though 
the accidents remain as before. Between 
the cradle and the grave man goes through 
a constant process of change, but that which 
makes each a definite individual, marked 
off from all others of his race in unique 
individuality, remains a fixed and immu- 
table ego, however much it may develop 
and expand, or degenerate and fail. Death 
itself, which destroys the accidents of 
earthly housing, cannot touch the immortal 
soul or diminish its integrity, though the 
visible manifestation may differ as much 
from that of its earthly habitation as the 
moth differs from the chrysalis or the ante- 
cedent worm. So in the case of the Holy 
Sacrament of the Altar, the words of con- 


L xv ] 


PREFACE 


secration and the miracle that follows 
thereon have no effect on the accidents of 
form, shape, colour, ponderability, but the 
substance has been wholly changed, and 
though to the senses the wafer is still but 
a white disk of unleavened bread, the wine 
but the fermented juice of the grape, the 
one has become, in substance, the very Body 
of Christ, the other His sacred Blood. 

For four centuries and more it has been 
the fashion to deny this fundamental differ- 
ence between substance and accidents, to 
maintain that the accidents are in fact the 
substance itself, and perilously to confuse, 
in every category of thought and action, the 
essential “ thing in itself,” with the casual 
and transient forms of its manifestations. 
The war is at the same time the penalty of 
this folly and its drastic corrective. What- 
ever may be its issue, one thing is sure, and 
that is its operation towards breaking all 
things into their component parts of inner 
fact and outward appearance: its merciful 
revelation of the illusory nature of the vis- 
ible forms of the commonly accepted dog- 
mas and axioms of four centuries, and of 
the eternal verity of things long hidden 
under deceitful masks, of the eternal falsity 


[ xvi | 


PREFACE 


of things that had come before us in appeal- 
ing and ingratiating guise. 

I have called these lectures, given during 
the winter of 1916-17 in the Lowell Insti- 
tute course in Boston, ‘The Substance of 
Gothic,” because in them an effort is made, 
though briefly and superficially, to deal 
with the development of Christian archi- 
tecture from Charlemagne to Henry VIII, 
rather in relation to its substance than its 
accidents; to consider it as a definite and 
growing organism and as the exact and un- 
escapable exponent of a system of life and 
thought antipodal to that of the modernism 
that began its final dissolution at the begin- 
ning of August A.D. 1914, rather than in the 
light of its accidents of form and ornament 
and details of structural design. Art was 
always the expression of the best in any 
people and in any time, until the last gen- 
eration when, if we are to retain any belief 
that then there was a definite “ best,” we 
must hold that it changed its nature and be- 
came, if not the manifestation of the worst, 
at least that of a very low average. During 
the period with which I deal there is no 
question on this point; between the fall of 
Rome and the triumph of the Renaissance 


[ xvu | 


PREFACE 


art of every kind was a visible setting forth 
of the highest aspirations and capacities of 
men, and it was even more intimately a part 
of personal and communal life than ever 
before. In every particular of ideal and of 
execution it follows precisely from life, and 
is neither to be estimated nor understood 
except in its relation to this life which itself 
must first be estimated and understood if its 
art is to be apprehended except after a very 
superficial fashion. 

When, early in the last century, men 
began to think back into the Middle Ages, 
the approach was invariably made through 
what philosophy would call the accidents 
of a time and a life that had left us no more 
than their superficial records. The admira- 
tion that grew so rapidly was not for the 
substance of Medievalism, for scholastic or 
sacramental philosophy, for Catholic theol- 
ogy, for communal organization on a human 
scale, it was rather for the outward forms 
of the several Christian arts, for the cere- 
monial and the devotional material of re- 
ligion, for the insubstantial residuum of an 
ultra-mystical philosophy, for the poetry 
and charm and pageantry of the Medieval 
decadence. It has needed this war to drive 


[ xviii J 


PREFACE 


men back and beyond the form to the matter 
itself, and to give them some realization of 
the singular force and potency and right- 
eousness of an epoch which begins now to 
show itself as the best man has ever created, 
and one as well that contains within itself 
the solution of our manifold and tragical 
difficulties, and is in fact the model whereon 
we must rebuild the fabric of a destroyed 
culture and civilization. 

The earliest estimate, like the earliest ad- 
miration for the rediscovered Gothic art, 
was based on these superficial forms. For 
many years Gothic architecture was re- 
garded, demonstrated and restored solely 
on the basis of its recorded forms, the 
centring of its arches, the contours of its 
mouldings, the nature and design of its or- 
nament. Commentators on Gothic art pro- 
duced one silly theory after another, praised 
inordinately its secondary qualities, and 
generally dealt with it after a purely em- 
pirical fashion. Amateur architects and 
builders copied its details (or satirized 
them) in wood and plaster, and the re- 
sults were deplorable. “ Strawberry Hill 
Gothic,” “‘ Carpenter’s Gothic,” “ Church- 
warden Gothic,” “ Victorian Gothic” (all 


[ xix ] 


PREFACE 


effective titles applied by the scoffers) suf- 
ficiently express the real quality of this 
catastrophic product which bore no earthly 
relationship to Gothic itself so far as its 
substance is concerned, and only the most 
distant resemblance to its forms. 
Following the “enlightened amateur ” 
came the scholar and the archeologist, and 
recently the effort has insistently been made 
to probe deeper and to determine the nature 
and content of the style on a more scientific 
basis. The unique and supreme organic 
system of Medieval architecture at its best, 
was discovered and analyzed, and this, ex- 
pressed with great accuracy and after the 
most approved “scientific method,” was 
brought forward as the essence and the cri- 
terion of Gothic. According to the pro- 
tagonists of this cult ‘ Gothic ” architecture 
is that alone wherein the groined, ribbed, 
pointed vault exists; where this controls the 
remainder of the organism, and where all 
things develop from, or are made subservi- 
ent to, this particular scheme of construc- 
tion. Conversely it follows, and is so stated, 
that any building where vaults of this na- 
ture do not exist, or were not contemplated, 
cannot be called Gothic. ‘The consequences 


[ xx | 


PREFACE 


are both complicated and (one would sup- 
pose) embarrassing. A thirteenth-century 
cathedral in some town in France is Gothic, 
but an adjoining dwelling, built at the same 
time, and perhaps by some of the cathedral 
workmen, is not. Westminster Abbey is 
Gothic, but Lincoln and Exeter are not, for 
the vault system does not logically deter- 
mine the other details. The choir of Can- 
terbury is Gothic, but a parish church 
constructed at the same time is not, if it 
happens to have a wooden roof, or, if 
vaulted, its pier sections are too large, and 
its walls are thick enough to take the vault 
thrusts without flying buttresses. 

Of course in a way it is a quarrel over 
a word. If the world wishes to adopt the 
name “ Gothic” and use it in the narrowly 
restricted sense indicated above, very well, 
only some other name must be discovered 
to describe the great and comprehensive 
impulse and product of which “ Gothic,” in 
that sense, will be only a sub-species. Now 
this word has been in universal use for five 
hundred years to indicate not a detail (al- 
beit the most important) of construction, 
but the whole body of art produced during 
the preceding five centuries to express the 


frexxi «| 


PREFACE 


concrete civilization of Catholic Europe. 
Deliberately to reverse the connotation of 
the word, giving it an entirely new and 
very restricted meaning, seems to me illogi- 
cal, unreasonable and even puerile. It 
smacks of the meticulous pedantry of nine- 
teenth-century Teutonism and is on a par 
with the philological testing of religious 
doctrine, the psychological determination 
of philosophical postulates, and the solution 
of the problem of life by the methods of a 
mechanistic physiological determinism. If 
the organic system of Gothic construction 
deserves (as it does) a special nomencla- 
ture, let us find or invent the right word, 
but for the spirit and impulse, the great 
body of artistic production, and specifically 
the unique architecture of the Christian 
Middle Ages, let us retain the venerable 
word “ Gothic,” for all the world knows 
what this indicates, even though it has a 
nebulous idea of what it means. 

Within the space of six lectures it is, of 
course, quite impossible to do more than 
indicate some few of the salient points in 
the system I have tried to establish as the 
one that must be developed if the architec- 
ture of Medievalism is to be appreciated 


[ xxi] 


PREFACE 


at its full value. All I have tried to do is 
to stimulate interest in the great epoch of 
Christian civilization and to deal, however 
superficially, with its architectural expres- 
sion as a supremely organic and living thing. 
If I have succeeded in the slightest degree, 
then it is possible for those who wish to 
follow the subject further to find in many 
volumes of scholarly and authoritative char- 
acter the careful working out of the various 
qualities in Medizvalism I have endeav- 
oured to epitomize. ‘The last decade is 
notable for the books that have been written 
along the lines of sympathetic, construc- 
tive and stimulating interpretation of the 
Middle Ages. At the head of the list I 
should place without question “ Mont-Saint- 
Michel and Chartres,” by Henry Adams 
(Houghton, Mifflin Company), and “ The 
Medieval Mind,” by Henry Osborne Tay- 
lor (Macmillan Company). The two 
books supplement each other and should 
be read together; so used, profound scholar- 
ship and an almost miraculous vision meet 
together and re-create Medievalism before 
our eyes. “The Thirteenth, Greatest of 
Centuries,” by Dr. Walsh (Catholic Sum- 
mer School Press), is also an authoritative 


eect 


PREFACE 


compendium of quite priceless information, 
while “‘ Reformation and Renaissance,” by 
J. M. Stone (E. P. Dutton & Company), 
and ‘The Catholic Church, the Renais- 
sance and Protestantism,” by Alfred Bau- 
drillart (Kegan Paul, Trench, Tribner & 
Co.), deal definitely with the transition 
from the Middle Ages to modernism. 
The great introductory essay in Montalem- 
bert’s ‘““ Monks of the West” still remains 
the authoritative pronouncement on monas- 
ticism. Political theory and practice are 
clearly outlined in “ Political Theories of 
the Middle Ages,” by Dr. Otto Gierke 
(Cambridge University Press), and in “A 
History of Medieval Political Theory,” by 
R. W. and A. J. Carlyle (G. P. Putnam’s 
Sons). For a clear and lucid statement of 
Medieval philosophy, in concise form, I 
know no better books than the two first 
named, by Mr. Adams and Mr. Taylor. 
Of course the works of St. Thomas Aquinas 
are now fully translated and St. Bernard is 
generally available. Unfortunately Hugh 
of St. Victor still awaits his translator and 
his commentator. There are many works 
on the guilds and the industrial and eco- 
nomic organization of the Middle Ages, 


[ xxiv ] 


PREFACE 


e.g. “ Industrial and Commercial History 
of England,” by Thorold Rogers, “ Village 
Communities in the East and West,” by Sir 
Henry Maine, “ The English Village Com- 
munity,” by F. Seebohm, and “ English 
Guilds,” published by the Early English 
Text Society. Two recent books, “The 
Servile State,” by Hilaire Belloc (F. N. 
Foulis), and “ The Real Democracy,” by 
Mann, Sievers and Cox (Longmans, Green 
& Co.), draw a striking contrast between 
the Medieval and modern industrial sys- 
tems, and as well between the guilds and 
contemporary trades unionism. 

Of the books dealing primarily with 
architecture I should place first Arthur 
Kingsley Porter’s “ Lombard Architecture”’ 
(Yale University Press) and his ‘“ Me- 
dieval Architecture” (Baker & Taylor 
Company). Professor Moore’s “ Gothic 
Architecture” (Macmillan & Company) 
is direct, concise and sympathetic, though 
I must dissent 1m toto from his limitation of 
the title ‘‘ Gothic” to the masonry-vaulted 
structures of France. “A History of Gothic 
Art in England,” by Edward 8. Prior 
(George Bell & Sons), “ Gothic Architec- 
ture in England” (B. T. Batsford) and 


xxv: 4 


PREFACE 


“Tntroduction to English Church Architec- 
ture’ (The Oxford University Press), both 
by Francis Bond, deal admirably with 
English Gothic; and Professor Lethaby’s 
‘Westminster Abbey and the King’s Crafts- 
men” (E. P. Dutton) gives a vivid idea of 
the methods of building during the Middle 
Ages. 

Cardinal Gasquet has written brilliantly 
on the later Middle Ages and the begin- 
nings of the Reformation, particularly in 
his ‘‘ Henry VIII and the English Mon- 
asteries”’ (John C. Nimmo), “ The Eve of 
the Reformation ”’ (Putnam & Company), 
and “The Old English Bible and Other 
Essays”? (George Bell & Son). Should 
there be those who care to read more that 
I have written along somewhat similar lines, 
I would suggest ‘The Ruined Abbeys of 
Great Britain” (James Pott), “ The Gothic 
Quest” (Doubleday, Page & Company), 
“The Ministry of Art” (Houghton, Mif- 
flin Company), and “ Heart of Europe” 
(Charles Scribner’s Sons). 

Finally, for gaining something of the 
wonderful spirit of Medigvalism at first 
hand, there remain the epics and verses of 
the period in their original form, “ Morte 


[ xxvi ] 


PREFACE 


d’Arthur,” by Sir Thomas Mallory, first, 
of course, with ‘“‘ The High History of the 
Holy Grail,” the latter admirably trans- 
lated by Sebastian Evans (Dent & Com- 
pany), and the ‘“ Song of Roland.” ‘“ Ro- 
mance Vision and Satire ”’ is a collection of 
translations into modern English by Miss 
Jessie Weston (Houghton, Mifflin Com- 
pany) of much of the earliest English verse, 
including the marvellous “ Pearl,” which 
is one of the most beautiful poems in the 
world. As translations they are far from 
exact, but the original spirit is marvellously 
preserved. Probably the best way to get 
aeeeeiecet!, 1s to read the Golancz text, 
with Miss Weston’s version as a “crib”; 
the Golancz translation is quite impossible. 
Of course in the end Dante remains the 
great Medieval synthesis, the ‘“ Divine 
Comedy” standing alone in power and 
beauty and exaltation— the very Middle 
Ages made visible. 

It is hardly necessary to say that this list 
is no more exhaustive than it is erudite. I 
have purposely chosen only those books that 
are non-technical, easily available, and writ- 
ten in English. Medievalism is the study 
of a lifetime, for it is that great cycle of 


[ xxvii | 


PREFACE 


five centuries wherein Christianity created 
for itself a world as nearly as possible made 
in its own image, a world that in spite of 
the wars and the desecrations, the ignorance 
and the barbarism and the “ restorations ” 
of modernism has left us monuments and 
records and traditions of a power and beauty 
and nobility without parallel in history. 
For three years the slow destruction of five 
centuries has been accelerated to a degree 
that passes belief, and the ruin of great art 
is symbolical of the equal ruin that is 
wrought in the last and lingering vestiges 
of an almost forgotten Christian civiliza- 
tion. If the wide desolation of war proves 
but the clearing of the field for the return 
of the spirit in life, and the mode of life, 
that once had issue in the Gothic art of a 
Catholic Europe, the price exacted from 
the world will not be too great to pay for 
so glorious a restoration. 
RALPH ADAMS CRAM. 


WHITEHALL, SUDBURY, 
MASSACHUSETTS, 
4th August, 1917. 


[ xxvii | 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PaGE 

I. THE Quarry or ANTIQUITY .. . I 
Il. THe AGE oF CHARLEMAGNE, ,... , 22 
III]. THe Great AWAKENING ....,. 62 
IV. Tue Epocu or TRANSITION . ..., 94 
V. THe Mepiavat SYNTHESIS . . . . 127 
VI. THE DECADENCE AND THE NEw 


VI. 


Uy od EE aT CA ee ee eR AL 


ConcLusion. Wuat Was MEDIAVAL 
Meet ATION ce.) 0 ae ee ol  S20T 


% 





+7 


PLATE 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


. CATHEDRAL OF NoTRE Dame, 


PR see ete oP rontispiere 
Facinc PacE 


. Hacta SopHia, CONSTANTINOPLE . 
. SAN PaoLo FUORI LE Mura, RoME . . 


Notre Dame pu Port, CLERMONT 
FERRAND . 


SANTA MarIA Maeaae Taschen 


. SAINT-GEORGES DE BOSCHERVILLE . . 
. Porcu, SAN GILLES. . . 
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THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


The Substance of Gothic 


LECTURE I 
THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


WE are called upon at this time to re- 
estimate our philosophies, to test by newly 
revealed criteria those concrete dogmas 
and formule accepted so generally and for 
so long a time as axiomatic: to interpret 
anew, and in the light of an impossible 
catastrophe, phenomena that had taken their 
places in a scheme of things that is for us 
no longer definitive or even convincing. 
Two years have cleft history in halves, and 
once more, as so often in the past, a long 
building-up of linked and sequent events 
stops suddenly short, cut by a colossal sword. 
A new order begins, the nature of which 
we cannot definitely determine; a new 
order subject to progressive revelation, and 
explicit only in one thing, its difference in 
every great and every little detail from all 
that went before. 

[1] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOD 


These sudden severances are sufficiently 
familiar to us in the past: so Hellenic 
civilization was cut short that Rome might 
have her day: so Rome fell and Mediter- 
ranean culture yielded to the barbarism of 
the North: so again this, when it had made 
of itself the high expression of Christian- 
ity, gave way in its turn to a new thing, the 
consistent, logical, and well-rounded epi- 
sode we have called Modern Civilization, 
working out its destiny through the three 
phases of Renaissance, Reformation, and 
Revolution that it might achieve at last its 
fruition through intellectualism, secular- 
ism, and materialism, and in its turn break 
down and disappear, to give place to that 
new era the nature of which is still in the 
balance, while a world in arms hammers 
out its unknown future on bloody anvils 
and in the shadow of unimaginable conflict. 

For us, looking backward over the clearly 
defined perspective of the past, it is easy to 
trace the great clefts in history as they cut 
like giant crevasses the rolling plateau of 
life, but when a bottomless chasm suddenly 
splits itself through the midst of our own 
normal existence, without warning and in 
violation of all personal experience, it is as 


[2] 


Pere OuUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


though on some summer morning the field 
at the bottom of the garden disappeared, 
with a crash of rending worlds, in an un- 
fathomable pit, raw and horrible, that rent 
itself with the speed of lightning through 
well-known meadows and hills and forests, 
leaving on the one side the shaken garden 
on the black edge of catastrophe, on the 
other all the once familiar world of cities 
and of men, no longer approachable, no 
longer even assured in its existence. 

The war the whole world said could 
never come, but the war that came never- 
theless, to the confusion of human assur- 
ance, means many things, most of which 
are still unrevealed, but two are sufficiently 
clear and they are, first: that the world after 
the war will be, for good or ill, an entirely 
new world; and second: that every pre- 
conceived idea of the man of the nineteenth 
century must now submit itself to the proc- 
ess of re-estimation. All that was essen- 
tially of the last epoch, i.e. from 1414 to 
1914, in religion, philosophy, and the con- 
duct of life, must subject itself to a new 
testing, for the blast of war is purging away 
the dross, and the alchemy of a world’s 
agony is transmuting base metal into refined 


[3] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


gold. Once more we are driven back from 
a world of phenomena to the everlasting 
verities. If by the grace of God (and our 
own humility) we are able to lay hold of 
them, we have won for ourselves a new 
Middle Ages, anew Renaissance; and what 
now seems the peril of a new Dark Ages 
passes away. 

In its essential contributions to religion, 
philosophy, and the conduct of life the last 
era of five centuries was, I believe, proceed- 
ing on lines that were in general malefic 
rather than beneficent, for it failed ignobly 
in the chief object of life, which is the de- 
velopment of character. Its contributions 
to material wealth, to intellectual com- 
petence, to mastery of the forces of nature, 
to ease, luxury, manners, to physical well- 
being and scientific achievement, were un- 
exampled in their magnitude, but in the 
concrete appreciation of these things (in 
themselves so full of potency), the failure 
was almost complete, and in the end the 
breakdown of character has been ominous 
and significant. It is true, however, that 
the by-products of the process were often 
of great value and these may in time be 
made operative to admirable ends, 


[4] 


THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


In its estimate of the past, its interpreta- 
tion of history, the conclusions were as 
erroneous as the method was ill-judged, and 
the result was an entirely false standard of 
comparative values and an almost complete 
negativing of the constructive powers for 
good inherent in the recorded annals of 
human experience and adventure. Finally 
it was an age that was responsible for the 
breakdown and almost complete disappear- 
ance of art as a vital force in society, a con- 
dition that, we must always remember, is 
unique in history. However low an art, or 
all the arts, may have fallen at certain 
rhythmical intervals in the past, there was 
always an irreducible minimum left, a 
nucleus which, as culture returned and 
civilization began again, served as the little 
leaven that in the end lightened the whole 
lump and made possible once more a new 
epoch of artistic achievement. 

I wish to speak to you during this course 
of lectures of one of the greatest of all the 
arts as .it ran its course from the time of its 
recovery in the west under Charlemagne 
to its transformation at the time of the 
Renaissance, the last episode occurring in 
England at the end of the reign of Henry 


Us 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


VIII —a period of seven centuries which 
exactly covers the era of specifically Chris- 
tian civilization in Europe. I wish to do 
this partly because architecture is the most 
human and general of all the arts and one 
which exerts its beneficent influence most 
widely; partly because it was the first of 
the arts to break down and disappear in the 
nineteenth century, maintaining itself since 
then only as a wistful and yet ardent effort 
at premeditated recovery; partly because 
the nineteenth century efforts at a critical 
and philosophical estimate of this particu- 
larly significant era of architecture seem to 
me peculiarly disastrous, in that they have 
resulted either in very erroneous conclusions 
as to the art itself and its position relative 
to the other phases of the same art, or in 
a method of estimate that eliminated all 
the inner and essential qualities that gave 
the architecture of this time its unique 
claim on a lasting admiration, and its pe- 
culiar significance for us of this day and 
generation. 

Two things may happen to art: trans- 
formation in form and transformation in 
content. The first is a more or less regular 
process operating, as does all human de- 


[6] 


THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


velopment, physical, mental, and spiritual, 
not by steady progression, or by spiral ascen- 
sion, as was once pleasantly feigned by the 
evolutionists of the nineteenth century, but 
by sudden and almost instantaneous leaps 
both forward and backward, with long fol- 
lowing periods either of slow progression 
or of equally slow degeneration. “ Catas- 
trophic” is a word that may be used in 
opposition to the old and no longer credible 
“evolutionary,” to express the sudden and 
even violent changes in direction and varia- 
tions in impulsive force that, acting in 
obedience to a mysterious stimulus, the 
source of which science cannot determine, 
initiate those changes in species and those 
rhythmical eras in progress and retrogres- 
sion that determine human life while they 
baffle all mechanistic systems of thought 
and become the nemesis of “the scientific 
method.” ‘These violent actions and reac- 
tions are very evident in all the arts and they 
determine those stylistic changes that give it 
so much of its intense vitality and make it 
so exactly an expression of life itself. Such 
was the revolution effected in fifty years 
when the Romanesque of the Normans gave 
place to the Gothic of the Franks, or that 


[7] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


other of an equal period of time, though 
varying in date as between one race and an- 
other, whereby Medizval art became the 
art of the Renaissance. ‘Transformation in 
content is a different thing altogether: it 
cannot be called periodic for it has hap- 
pened only once, and that so recently that 
the event is almost within our own memory. 

However great the transformations in 
form that have occurred from time to time 
in the past, they have never altered the con- 
tent of art itself, which has always remained 
a perfectly definite thing, an inalienable 
heritage of man, working within certain 
clearly circumscribed lines, in accordance 
with an unchanging method, toward an un- 
varying end. It has presupposed the exist- 
ence of beauty, relative at first but absolute 
in fact, and susceptible always, in its abso- 
lute form, of approximation and, though 
rarely, of achievement. This beauty — of 
form, line, colour, chiaroscuro, tone, mel- 
ody, harmony, rhythm — has been desirable 
in itself, and because of its power of sensu- 
ous delight, but even more as a means of 
expressing symbolically, and therefore sac- 
ramentally, those spiritual adventures, ex- 
periences, and achievements which tran- 


[8] 


THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


scend the sphere of the physical and the 
intellectual, and therefore can be expressed 
only after a symbolical or sacramental 
fashion. In other words beauty, which is 
the vehicle of art, may be, and has been, 
used for the expression for man, and from 
one to another, of those highest things of 
life and experience, which are, by their 
very nature, unsusceptible of other mani- 
festation. 

Now this beauty is not, either as beauty 
or as a mode of expression, a matter of per- 
sonal idiosyncrasy. Specific individuals, 
sometimes called artists, precipitate it, give 
it form, infuse it with an element of their 
own personality, and shape it in the con- 
crete through power of craftsmanship, in 
them more highly developed than amongst 
their fellows. This does not make the art 
their own: the beauty with which they deal 
is not the emanation of their own idiosyn- 
crasies, it is as universal and immutable as 
right and wrong or the law of gravitation. 
The artist has a certain sensitiveness to 
beauty just as others are sensitive to phil- 
osophical, mathematical, or mechanical 
stimuli, therefore he can isolate this 
beauty better than another. ‘The artist is 


[9] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTVitae 


a trained, exquisite, and competent crafts- 
man in stone, wood, marble, pigments, 
musical notes, what you will; working with 
ardour and devotion in accordance with the 
slowly developed laws of his particular 
craft, therefore able to do what others can- 
not do. The artist contributes an element 
of his own personality, so bringing his art 
down to earth, making it human, and vital- 
izing it with personality; giving it distinc- 
tion, in other words. Yet all this does not 
make the art his own, for unless there is be- 
hind him a communal self-consciousness, 
unless the air is quick with impulses and 
desires of the whole people eager for the 
expression of their own spiritual experi- 
ences and emotions, or at the least for the . 
visible manifestation of that beauty in which 
they themselves can find pleasure and con- 
tent, then the art of the individual, how- 
ever great he may be, is a fond thing, vainly 
imagined, and no part of any life save only 
his own. Until the last hundred years, or 
even less, the artist was a mouthpiece and a 
servant, though increasingly laggard in his 
service. He is now a rebel and an outlaw, 
and though he himself may be a greater 
artist than his forebears, his place in society 


[ 10 ] 


THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


is fundamentally different. Under these 
conditions he cannot prolong the succession, 
and becomes the last of his race. 

This change from universal art to pe- 
culiar art has actually taken place within 
the century, and transformation in content 
has been effected, for the first time in his- 
tory. Within twenty years the inevitable 
result has shown itself, and the personal, 
idiosyncratic art which, through a number 
of very great geniuses at the end of the last 
century, deceived us by its competence into 
the belief that art had been born again (or 
was still continuing) has passed, and we 
are now confronted by certain anomalous 
products, in all the arts, which are not 
art at all but the mouthings of anarchy, 
the pathological reactions of a spiritual 
degeneration now in the last stages of its 
progress. 

It is significant that this phenomenon 
should synchronize exactly with the reveal- 
ing breakdown of what is known as modern 
civilization. This civilization proceeded to 
its supreme achievement through four cen- 
turies of cumulative development and ever 
accelerating momentum, cresting at last in 
the second decade of the twentieth century 


[11] 


THE SUBSTANCE, OF GOTEigG 


only to break as a wave breaks, and fall in 
destroying dissolution. During the same 
period the fate of art was being accom- 
plished and it is now involved in the same 
ruin. That this is not a final estate we must 
all be persuaded. Nothing exactly like it 
has ever happened before, it is true, but 
nothing even remotely like modern civiliza- 
tion has ever happened before. From time 
to time under the racking shock of dis- 
appointment, disillusionment, and vanity 
wounded to death; under the staggering 
horrors of the piling of a Pelion of human 
agony on the Ossa of human infamy, we 
doubt if this is not indeed the end of the 
world, the preliminary skirmish of Arma- 
geddon. For those at least who hold to 
their faith in Christianity this natural fear 
breaks down under a resurgent faith and 
they are able to look beyond catastrophe to 
a consequent regeneration, so believing that 
once more the sane sequence of life will be 
re-established after the great readjustment 
has been accomplished. 

This readjustment, which will affect 
every category of life, involves a new scru- 
tiny of all the things man has done in the 
past and a new estimating of the motive 


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tobe QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


forces behind these actions. In the red 
light of war, the last era of human activity, 
the ‘““ Modern Era” shows itself in many 
ways as a “sport,” a development along 
lines not implied by the pre-Renaissance 
world but striking off at an unexpected and 
not wholly advantageous angle. It is now 
confronted by the blunt “ No Thorough- 
fare” of an annihilating war, and of neces- 
sity there must be a certain measure of re- 
turn toward the point where the wrong path 
was chosen. In the abnormal development 
of the peculiar elements of modern civiliza- 
tion several essential matters, essential to 
sane and righteous life, have been lost sight 
of, and their determination and recovery 
form the first task of the world that follows 
the War. Immediately, therefore, we must 
expect, and ensure, a new scrutinizing of 
history, largely for the purpose of discern- 
ing just what the vital impulses were that 
lay behind those epochs of civilization more 
successful than our own, in order that these 
may be made operative again toward that 
great regeneration that must follow war, if 
we are not to sink back into a period of 
Dark Ages differing only from those that 
followed the fall of Rome in the greater 


[ 13 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


blackness of their shame and the increased 
profundity of their oblivion. 

This is my excuse for taking up with you 
the question of the historical development 
of one of the arts, and at a time when all 
of us have little heart for the amenities of 
life. But art is not an amenity of life: that 
is just the point. Modern civilization has 
made it that, and in this also modern civi- 
lization is wrong. It is an integral part of 
life itself, as indispensable as religion or 
ethics or philosophy. It is the heritage of 
all, not the appanage of the few, though it 
has become the latter through the operation 
of the false principles inherent in our 
scheme of existence. For more than four 
centuries the process of degeneration has 
been working itself out, though it was only 
during the nineteenth century that each of 
the arts finally succumbed, architecture 
going first, music and poetry coming last. 
But for the War the case would have ap- 
peared hopeless and we could have con- 
fronted nothing but a life from which art 
in all its forms was definitely excluded. 
Now the War gives us not only a new hope, 
but a new impulse; a hope that art in all its 
myriad forms may come again, an impulse 


[14] 


THE “QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


to go back and learn more, and along dif- 
ferent lines, of the art of the past and of 
what made it what it was, in order that we 
may contribute something along these lines 
to the new civilization that must arduously 
be built up on the ruins of a great failure. 
Art, in its many forms, is the most reli- 
able history of a time, largely because it 
does not deal with concrete facts which, 
so far as absolute and final truth is con- 
cerned, are of the nature of statistics, pro- 
verbially said to be of the third and highest 
degree of lies. The modern historical 
method deals with facts, which are further 
emphasized in their error by the applica- 
tion of a mechanistic psychology, and the 
result is about as illuminating as is the 
method of the “higher criticism” when 
applied to the Scriptures, or that of Morelli 
in the case of attributions in painting. If 
you would know what sort of men and 
women they were who lived at any time, — 
how they thought and felt, and why, — and 
if you would approach some sound critical 
estimate of the life they made, the world of 
thought and feeling in which they lived, 
_go back to their art; to their architecture, 
painting, and sculpture, their poetry, drama, 


[15 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


and music, their industrial arts, their litur- 
gics, and their ceremonial. To create a 
fabulous epoch out of chronicles, dates, con- 
crete acts, and documents, all fused in the 
alembic of a personal and arbitrary psychol- 
ogy, and then to test the art of that epoch 
by this curious philtre, is folly: far more 
sensible is it to interpret and co-ordinate 
these same events in the light of the art that 
is in itself the clear and naive revelation of 
the soul of any time. 

Behind our own era, which as I have 
said begins with the first stirrings of the 
Renaissance, lies the epoch of the Middle 
Ages. For four hundred years it was mis- 
judged and misrepresented by historians 
and forgotten by the world at large. Three 
quarters of a century ago it was rediscov- 
ered, and the romanticism of the early nine- 
teenth century in France and England, the 
Catholic revival in religion, the Gothic 
restoration in architecture were its first vis- 
ible manifestations. Naturally they were 
all more or less tinged by superficiality, by 
a pale copying of externals, and naturally 
also they synchronized with the triumphant 
achievements of that modern civilization 
against which they were a protest. For 


[ 16 ] 


THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


both reasons the first movement broke down, 
and the elapsed years of the twentieth cen- 
tury saw its submergence under an univer- 
sally victorious modernism. Now this vic- 
tory shows itself as no other than ignomini- 
ous defeat, and war sweeps the field clear 
for new things. Can we, therefore, attempt 
a new method, and as the echoes of annihila- 
tion die away over the wide ruin of a dead 
era, try once more to get nearer the secret 
of this great epoch of Christian civilization 
and recover something of its potency for 
ourselves? 

Much of what we need now, and shall 
need increasingly when rebuilding takes the 
place of destruction, lies there, — more than 
we suspect, or, for the moment, should wel- 
come. Confining ourselves, therefore, to 
the single art of architecture, let us see if 
we can discover what this paramount art of 
the Middle Ages really was, what it grew 
from, and by the operation of what forces, 
— what it has for us today, not only in the 
re-creation and rehabilitation of our own 
dead art of architecture, but what it can 
show us of the methods and accomplish- 

ment of a great and very sane era of cul- 
ture and civilization. 


Bey 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


When, fat with her wealth, her power, 
and her pride of life, Rome fell before the 
barbarian invaders, the destinies of Europe 
were changed forever. The Mediterra- 
nean races gave place to those from the 
Baltic, the south yielded to the north, 
civil power to ecclesiastical, secular Chris- 
tianity to monastic, patristic theology to the 
personal religion of the people; pagan and 
Alexandrian philosophy was for the time 
extinguished, and nationalism was merged 
in tribalism. An “act of oblivion” was 
passed by the dominant and savage north; 
for three centuries progressive forgetful- 
ness held dominion while a new race of 
men hammered out the rough foundations 
of anew world and the shaking successors of 
St. Peter sat in a desolated Rome, the only 
centre of approximate order in a whirlpool 
of anarchy. 

It is as hard to comprehend the complete 
extinguishing of classical civilization in the 
fifth century, as it would be for us today 
to imagine the total obliteration of all the 
achievements of the last four centuries, yet 
the real and the supposititious cases are the 
same, and what has once happened may 
happen again. In hardly more than an 


[ 18 ] 


DAP PTOUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


hundred years a State coterminous with the 
world, proud, wealthy, invincible in the 
field, boasting a superficial culture, insolent 
in its assurance, magnificent in all its out- 
ward forms of art and pageantry, broke 
down, crumbled and utterly disappeared. 
Rome declared her ability to extend her 
own culture, with her civil and military 
dominion, to all the barbarous peoples of 
three continents, and in the end found that, 
instead, she had sunk to the level of those 
she would succour, who, themselves the vic- 
tors, entered in and took possession. From 
all sides, east, west, north, south, savage 
hordes crept over the marble villas and 
pleasant gardens and fertile farms of Brit- 
ain, Gaul, the Rhineland, Africa, Syria, 
leaving only ruin and desolation. Crept on 
the great summer resorts with their terraced 
palaces and their luxurious and profligate 
life, the resorts that made the mountain 
valleys and delicate rivers and Mediter- 
ranean headlands and beaches pleasure 
haunts of infinite delight. One by one they 
vanished in flame and sack, until the forests 
returned, the sand washed higher, obliterat- 
ing even the calcined fragments of an archi- 
tecture such as the world had never seen 


[19] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


before. Alaric, Genseric, Attila, Ricimer, 
one hardy and scornful leader after another, 
laid siege to Rome, captured and sacked it, 
and returned with booty that weighed down 
the thousands of horses and the tens of 
thousands of warriors. At last the wolves 
prowled unmolested amongst the temples 
and basilicas, the baths and fora and pal- 
aces, of what had once been Imperial Rome, 
while pestilence and famine decimated all 
Italy, and deep woods and _ poisonous 
marshes took the place of crowded cities 
and broad acres of farms and gardens. 
Even memory of what had been was lost, 
at least for the west. On the Bosporus a 
New Rome preserved a lingering tradition 
that died away before a subtle and encroach- 
ing Orientalism and a degenerate but de- 
lectable Hellenism. In the Benedictine 
monasteries, now fast rising as fortresses of 
refuge in the midst of catastrophe, manu- 
scripts from devastated libraries were gath- 
ered together and preserved, but the spirit 
that alone possessed any element of vitality 
was now anti-pagan and ascetic, and the 
monks only guarded what they would not 
use. And as the last memory of a classical 
past had disappeared, so for several cen- 


[ 20 ] 


Mere OUAKRY: Ol ANTIQUITY 


turies the new power —northern, Chris- 
tian and monastic— showed no signs of 
Creating anything to take its place. Cul- 
ture, even of the most rudimentary kind, 
was non-existent: there was no art of any 
sort, neither architecture, painting, sculp- 
ture, poetry, music, drama, nor even the 
minor arts of the craftsman. Education 
was practically unknown, save the bare 
rudiments that the priest must have, and 
of learning there was no vestige in all 
Europe. 

It was a good clean blood, however, 
that had entered the veins of Europe in 
place of the poisoned and vitiated blood of 
the south, and health conquered disease. 
Clovis, who had defeated the degenerate 
Romans at the Battle of Soissons in 486 and 
accepted Christianity ten years later, had 
established a new State in Gaul, Catholic, 
in opposition to the Arian heresies of the 
other converted northern tribes. St. Bene- 
dict in the year 529 had founded his Order 
that was to act as the spiritual stimulus of 
Europe for a thousand years. In 587 Spain 
had been won over from Arianism to Ca- 
—tholicism, in 590 St. Gregory became Pope 
and wrenched the Church from the mire of 


EaTs| 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHTG 


the great degeneration, and in 597 sent St. 
Augustine to begin the work of regenera- 
tion in England. It was a good beginning, 
but the power of dissolution was greater 
than that of recovery; outside the monas- 
teries culture and decency disappeared, 
Mohammedanism rushed in like a flood 
against the narrowing frontiers of Chris- 
tianity, Spain was lost and the future seemed 
to hold nothing but ruin and an ending of 
all things. 

With the year 732 the real recovery be- 
gan, for it was then, at the Battle of ‘Tours, 
that Charles Martel —the Hammer that 
not only smote back the Mohammedan in- 
vasion but forged the mighty fabric of the 
House of the Carolings — halted the Moors 
in their invasion of Europe that already 
had swept nearly to the gates of Paris. 
Thirty-five years later Charlemagne began 
the rebuilding of European civilization, 
crushing the degenerate Lombards in Italy, 
and the savage Saxons and Bavarians; de- 
stroying the Avars in Austria, winning back 
northern Spain, and giving a measure of 
unity to a distracted and dislocated Europe. 

It is the fashion to attribute to Charle- 
magne himself the credit for the sudden if 


Pee 


THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


short recovery of art and learning and cul- 
ture of the last half of the eighth century, 
but as a matter of fact they and he were 
linked results of the same slow process of 
regeneration that began with St. Benedict 
in his cave at Subiaco. He was of course 
the visible agency of the culminating 
achievement, for God always works through 
individual men and women in the develop- 
ment of His Will as this is exhibited on 
earth, and it is only just that for all time 
the first fruits of Christian society, organ- 
ized and operative, should bear his name. 

We must realize, however, that already a 
great process of development had begun, 
the end of which was to be a definitely 
Christian system of life, when every phase 
of thought and action should be interpene- 
trated by a specifically Catholic force. The 
entire space of time from Theodoric to 
Otho the Great, exactly five centuries, is 
given over to the struggles of a new spirit 
to achieve the mastery, with its partial suc- 
cess under Charlemagne, which was imme- 
diately followed by complete failure, as 
this in its turn was succeeded by a more 
vigorous effort that was quickly crowned 
_ by success. 


[234 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


There is something almost mysterious in 
the way in which the idea of secular world- 
Empire grew under the Cesars, simultane- 
ously with the idea of a world-Church. 
This is the great contest of the first five 
centuries of the Christian era, determined 
at last against the imperial State, but not as 
yet in favour of the imperial Church. As 
Gregorovius says, the Empire stood for slav- 
ery and despotism, with complete poverty 
in creative ideas in civilization. All that 
tended to raise the intellectual spirit to the 
higher regions of thought was either non- 
existent, or acclimatized from other lands. 
On the other hand, the idea of the spiritual 
world-State was developing simultaneously, 
and Rome, the Eternal City, no sooner lost 
all claim to the title, as a material force, 
than she was taken over by the new spiritual 
force, regenerated, made again of universal 
dominion, and her claim to the epithet 
“Eternal”? vindicated anew. When the 
Empire fell the Church was already an uni- 
versal organization under the supreme di- 
rection of the Bishop of Rome who was 
acknowledged to be the Vicar of God on 
Earth, and the imperium passed to her, of 
right, though the process of transfer took 


[ 24 ] 


AWORY ‘Van AT TWONA OTOVG NVS aj 


I 








ty 


Mitte OUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


some time to accomplish—the epoch 
known in history as the Dark Ages. 

After their first successful invasions, the 
Goths maintained a remote civil dominion 
for Rome, or rather for the old Imperial 
Roman idea, but after their defeat by the 
emissaries of Byzantium, the last vestiges 
of secular supremacy died away and its 
impotent traditions maintained only a pale 
continuance at Ravenna. It is during this 
time that the Church made herself the 
dominant influence in Europe, first by the 
conversion of the Lombards and the other 
heretical tribes, second by her successful 
warfare against the Idea of the East as this 
was embodied in the exarchs. Through 
the first she exterminated the Arian and 
other heresies, united Christianity and made 
it Catholic over all Europe. Through the 
second she beat back the peril of gov- 
ernmental absolutism and made possible 
the Christian social system, which was 
feudalism. 

During the great warfare that achieved 
such vast victories there was little possibil- 
ity of a creative culture that would have 
expression in the form of art of any kind; 
the issues were too colossal, the crises too 


[25] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


acute. Not until the time of Charlemagne 
could society begin to reap the benefits of 
its great enfranchisement, but then the 
ground had been won and held, though in- 
securely, and the artistic results inevitably 
followed. 

What these results were, in architectural 
form, I shall try to show in my next lecture; 
in the meantime I wish to place before you 
the material from which these results were 
obtained. 

Neither architecture, nor any other art, 
is the product of individual genius. There 
is no such thing, properly speaking, as a 
“new” style, and there never can be a 
“new” art cut off from the succession of 
the past. Perhaps this is why the sup- 
' posititious art of today — art nouveau, cub- 
ist, impressionist, imagist, what you will 
-— 1s not art at all, but an unpleasant fiction 
_ of auto-suggestion. ‘The art of the Caro- 
lingian era was genuine art, as far as it 
went, and it was based on certain remains 
of the antecedent epoch and worked out 
largely by means of enduring principles 
and traditions inherited from the same time. 
The strictly pagan remains of Rome, south- 
ern France, Tréves were completely ig- 


[ 26 ] 


Paes OUARRY OF ANTIOUITY 


nored, though in the eighth century they 
were ten times as numerous as now. In- 
stead recourse was had to pagan architec- 
ture as it had been adapted by Christianity, 
and of this there was also far more than has 
been preserved to our own time. 

This “ Early Christian Architecture ” 
had its habitat in four widely severed places, 
but all of them available to Europe through 
merchants, travellers, and pilgrims going to 
or sent from these then flourishing centres. 
Rome, Ravenna, Constantinople, and Syria 
were, in varying degrees, centres of wealth 
and activity in the Dark Ages, and even then 
intercourse amongst them was constant, and 
of a magnitude we can hardly appreciate. 
In Rome were the great Constantinian 
basilicas, — St. Peter’s, St. John Lateran, 
Sta. Maria Maggiore, San Clemente, Sta. 
Agnese, and scores of others of lesser mag- 
nitude, all couched in much the same style, 
all magnificent, and touched with the mys- 
terious splendour of the recognized centre 
of spiritual authority and of civil dominion. 
Always simple in plan, though varying con- 
siderably in design (some being of the most 
archaic basilican type, others with lofty 
galleries over the aisles, long ranges of 


(274 


THE: SUBSTANCE OF GOTEe 


clerestory windows, and added accessories 
of chapels and baptisteries), they all were 
rich with antique columns of precious 
marbles, sheathing of porphyry and ala- 
baster, golden and azure mosaics, and altars 
and ambos and thrones of the most sumptu- 
ous design and the most rare materials. To 
them men turned naturally first of all, and 
then to Constantinople, where Justinian had 
but recently immortalized himself as the 
most princely builder of all time, through 
his sequence of great domed temples, as 
incredible in their magnificence as they 
were masterly in their original scheme of 
construction. Hagia Sophia was of course 
the everlasting wonder of all Christendom, 
but there were countless other smaller 
churches, such as St. Irene and Holy Apos- 
tles, and in Salonika, Trebizond, Bethle- 
hem, Jerusalem, as well. Numbers of these 
have wholly disappeared under Turkish 
conquest, and we can only guess at their 
nature, but there were many in the eighth 
century, well known to the people of the 
time, of which we know only by contem- 
porary records. 

In Syria, which is now for us only a bar- 
ren desert, there were the great cities of a 


[ 28 ] 


THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


once sumptuous civilization, and it is here, 
half hidden under sand and debris, that 
much has recently been found by Professor 
Butler of Princeton that gives another aspect 
to Christian archeology. Here were three 
great schools of architecture, counting from 
north to south, which seem to contain more 
of the elements of Medieval art than are 
to be found elsewhere. It is from Syria, 
apparently, that Diocletian drew the build- 
ers of his amazing palace at Spalato, and 
that Justinian found those who were to de- 
velop for him the magnificent building of 
his reign. In the south were the curious 
structures, wholly of stone, that de Vogue 
has so carefully studied, with their piers 
instead of columns, their close-set transverse 
nave and aisle arches carrying roofs of stone 
slabs, and their arch abutments precisely 
like those we find centuries later at Sant’ 
Ambrogio, Milan. Here also we find, as 
at Zor-ah, the primitive domical churches, 
polygonal in plan, set within a square, and 
with absidioles in the angles, that are the 
prototypes of San Vitale and Aix-la-Cha- 
pelle. In the middle school, the closely 
built piers of the south give place to very 
wide spacing, with broad round arches and 


[ 29 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


low clerestories of narrow windows. The 
aisles are vaulted in stone, the roofs are of 
wood. Here also we discover the norm of 
the great flanking towers of the west ends 
of Norman and Gothic abbeys and cathe- 
drals, though at first they are low and rise 
but little above the roof levels. The com- 
plete parallel that exists between the 
exterior architectural treatment of these 
churches and that of the twelfth century 
Romanesque work of southern France, is 
startling. Columns are used on the apses 
and chapels precisely as they are employed 
there, and with the arched corbel table form 
the prototype of the pilaster strips and 
cornices of Lombardy and the Rhine. In 
the north columns, once more, are gener- 
ally used as supports; there are three apses, 
instead of one, and these, curiously enough, 
are often square in plan, even the main 
sanctuary, like the early British church that 
fixed the permanent type of square-ended 
plan in England. Another singular innova- 
tion is the lifting of the side chapels into 
towers of several stories framing in the 
apse; a device which appears later at 
Como and goes thence to the Rhineland, 
where it becomes a characteristic and en- 


[ 30 ] 


THE QUARRY OF ANTIQUITY 


tirely local feature. In this northern school 
the feeling is predominantly Greek, in form 
as well as in decoration. ‘The carved orna- 
ment is crisp and clean, and merges rapidly 
into the intricate and brilliant patterning 
of Byzantine art. 

Finally, we have Ravenna with its work 
of Theodoric and the Byzantine exarchs; 
the tomb of Galla Placidia, San Vitale, 
the two churches of Sant’ Apollinare, the 
baptistery, and probably other monuments 
now destroyed. Both plan types are here, 
basilican and domical, together with the 
little tomb church, which is cruciform, 
with a rudimentary central tower. Less 
magisterial than the Roman basilicas, less 
magnificent than the gold and marble won- 
ders of Byzantium, the work is more akin 
to the temper of the north and west, and 
more adaptable because of its scale. Such 
a plan as that of San Vitale would stimulate 
any builder to creative action, as it did; 
and the old school of craftsmen seemed to 
last longer here than anywhere else, except 
perhaps amongst the Comacini. At Pom- 
posa and Bagnacavallo, near by, and at 
Grado and Parenzo in Istria, are other ex- 
amples of Ravennesque work; and alto- 


[31] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


gether the city of the exarchs and of the 
great northern barbarian, Theodoric, who 
proved himself so sane and beneficent a 
ruler, offered in the eighth century a series 
of models that could only serve as a strong 
incentive the moment a real, if transient, 
vitality appeared in society itself. 


[32] 


LECTURE II 
THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


WITH the destruction of the magnificent 
governmental system of Rome, all sem- 
blance of civil order and authority was lost. 
Sense of nationality was non-existent as yet, 
racial lines had not asserted themselves, and 
by a perfectly natural process the feudal 
system grew up around the strong men, and 
with the cordial approval of the Church. 
In principle, and even more in its work- 
ing out, it proved a most admirable and 
efficient scheme of political and social 
organization. From an economic stand- 
point it was more successful and far more 
just and beneficent than the industrial slav- 
ery that preceded it, or the capitalistic 
régime that has taken its place. ‘This was 
particularly true after it had fully devel- 
oped the guild system which, during the 
golden era of the central Middle Ages, 
guaranteed freedom, justice, and honour- 
able status for industry of every kind, 
[ 33 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOYVHte 


Politically the results were equally good. 
Every man owed service and a certain 
amount of tribute in kind to the over-lord 
next above him, who in his turn owed sim- 
ilar service and truage, with the others of 
his class, to the baron or count or bishop or 
abbot in the next rank of the hierarchy, and 
so on up to the sovereign authority over the 
tribe or race or other governmental unit. 
On his own part the over-lord was in theory 
bound to defend the life and land of his 
vassals and to see that justice was done 
amongst them. ‘The result was that from 
the unit of the family up through the com- 
mune, the county, the kingdom, and — from 
Charlemagne on, as a general thing — the 
Empire, every man was an integral part of 
a small, manageable and personal group, not 
as now, a negligible point in a vast and ab- 
stract proposition where all personal rela- 
tionship, personal duty, personal obligation 
are impossible. 

Out of this orderly organization grew the 
sense of honour, and of faithful personal 
service on the one hand, of generosity and 
protection on the other, and we can under- 
stand nothing of Medizvalism unless we 
give just regard to this almost fundamental 


[ 34 ] 


THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


element in its constitution. Of course I am 
stating here only an ideal, for there were 
innumerable cases of failure, on the one 
side or the other, to live up to this ideal; 
cases of rebellion and treachery; of oppres- 
sion, cruelty, and dishonour, but there is 
good evidence to show that the ideal was 
then as nearly approached in the majority 
of instances, as, we will say, the ideals of 
democracy have been approached in the 
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

I am sensible of the fact that some of you 
may be very much shocked at hearing me 
praise feudalism, and call.it, as I most cer- 
tainly do, the nearest recorded approach to 
the Christian commonwealth. If you in- 
deed are stirred by this sentiment then that 
is what I mean when I refer to the misin- 
terpretation of history that was one of the 
salient characteristics of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. The number of things that are called 
“Medieval,” particularly by political ora- 
tors, educational experts, and other imper- 
fectly educated people, is astounding. It is 
a general term of modern, — as “ Gothic ”’ 
was a general term of Renaissance, — con- 
tempt, and it is employed with indifferent 
discretion. Absolutism in government, re- 


[35 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


ligious persecution, the Inquisition, untidi-. 
ness, conservatism, are all cheerfully de- 
nominated ‘ Medieval,” in calm-disregard 
of the fact that they are all inventions or 
practices of the Renaissance, or even, some 
of them, of more modern times. In the 
same way, feudalism, which certainly was 
Medieval, is used as a synonym for all that 
is dark, barbarous and oppressive. 

A word of warning should be given those 
who, very properly, turn to available con- 
temporary documents, particularly those of 
a legal nature, to obtain a first-hand idea of 
feudalism as an actuality. The legal theo- 
ries of feudalism were very lightly regarded 
in actual practice, for there it was never a 
question of what the law was, or might be 
made, but what had been established by 
ancient custom and universal acceptance. 
The insanity of law-making and law-tinker- 
ing which has been and is the curse of mod- 
ern society is hardly three centuries old and 
was then unknown. Government is not now 
a system of laws but of decrees, differing 
little in motive from the irresponsible edicts 
of absolutism, and the result is general con- 
tempt and a flagrant willingness to evade 
the provisions of these decrees by every 


[ 36 | 





IV. Norre Dame pu Port, CLERMoNT FERRAND 





THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


possible means. Then the full force of uni- 
versal custom was supreme; laws were this 
custom proved and codified, and as a result 
Law had a force that made it almost impre- 
scriptible, while it represented not fluctuant 
opinion but the matured results of the in- 
terplay of influences both high and low. 

A case in point is the shocking “ droit de 
seigneur,” so often referred to by super- 
ficial students of Medievalism. There is 
actually no evidence to prove that this was 
a recognized custom or even anything but 
the most sporadic offence, no more repre- 
sentative of feudalism than the alleged 
“blue laws” are representative of democ- 
racy. In the Middle Ages all relationship 
was personal and direct, and of course much 
depended on the personality of the over- 
lord, but higher than he was Custom, the 
unwritten and immemorial law of society; 
and this custom was far less easily flouted 
or evaded than are modern laws that are 
too well known in the methods of their in- 
ception and their enforcement to command 
respect or ensure their obedient acceptance 
by those who would evade their provisions. 

I dare say the later feudalism, as it ap- 
_ peared in the last days of the Middle Ages 


(37. 


THE SUBSTANCE OF ‘GOVE 


in Germany, and in other parts of Europe 
in the earlier Renaissance, was dark, bar- 
barous, and oppressive, but I am speaking 
of it as it was in the eleventh, twelfth, and 
thirteenth centuries, while it was the basis 
of Christian society, and then it certainly 
was quite the reverse. It came nearer a real 
democracy than any other of the manifold 
and optimistic experiments of man, for it 
more nearly abolished privilege, estab- 
lished equal opportunity and utilized abil- 
ity, while it fixed the means of production 
in the hands of the people, guaranteed a 
fairly even distribution of wealth, organ- 
ized workmen and craftsmen and artists 
on a just and equable basis of labour and 
compensation, and therefore helped in the 
greatest production of vigorous, righteous, 
and noble character that is of record in 
human annals. 

As economic feudalism had its flowering 
in the guild system, so social feudalism grew 
through the Crusades into the institution of 
chivalry which, until it degenerated into the 
licentious pageantry of the Renaissance, was 
a vital force in society no substitute for 
which has as yet been found. Of this, how- 
ever, there was nothing at the moment when 


[ 38 ] 


THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


Charlemagne took on himself the co-ordina- 
tion of the wandering efforts that had pre- 
ceded him, and the application of them 
toward the organization of a new State and 
the development of a new culture. Feudal- 
ism was then in its most primitive estate, 
nothing more than the offensive-defensive 
alliance of groups of harried and poverty- 
stricken men for the sheer preservation of 
life and such poor property as they had. 

The monastic system, as it had been or- 
ganized by St. Benedict, he possessed in an 
highly developed form, and he used it for its 
full value. Indeed, without it he could have 
done nothing, he could hardly have existed, 
and it is not too much to say that but for the 
monks from the sixth to the fourteenth cen- 
tury, there would have been no Medieval- 
ism, nor even any civilization at all, and 
we still might be painting ourselves a dead 
blue, with woad, as did our ancestors in 
early Britain. 

The Church of the first five centuries had 
been essentially episcopal, that is, the devel- 
opment and fixing of doctrine, discipline, 
and ceremonial, the suppression of innu- 
merable heresies, the direction of the con- 
science both of individuals and of the 


[ 39 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


Church itself, had been the work of the 
episcopal order — bishops, metropolitans, 
patriarchs, with, for at least three of those 
centuries, the Pope sitting above all and 
acting as the co-ordinating force. The 
Church of the two succeeding epochs of five 
centuries each, was essentially monastic, 
with the Pope, secure and alone in his 
supremacy, undisputed spiritual lord of all 
Christendom, save only the patriarchate of 
the east which was steadily declining in 
culture, in moral force, and in civil author- 
ity. From the year 529 the monasteries 
of St. Benedict formed an ever-increasing 
number of refuges from a world crumbling 
about men’s ears, the only centres of order, 
of culture (such as it was), of ethical in- 
tegrity. They rapidly took over many of 
the functions of the destroyed civil govern- 
ment — education, mercy, the direction of 
agriculture and industry, the fostering of 
art and letters — and in that long interval 
between the destruction of the Roman im- 
perium and the rebirth of sense of national- 
ity served as the centres around which dis- 
tracted men gathered into communities for 
self-preservation. If we are tempted at 
times to disapprove the apparent seculariza- 


[ 40 | 


THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


tion of abbots, monks, and monasteries, in 
the Dark Ages and during Medievalism, 
we must remember that tasks and duties 
rightly belonging to the civil order had been 
taken over by them simply because there 
was nothing else that would or could ad- 
minister them, and that therefore they were 
forced to play a dual role if society was to 
be preserved from total destruction. 

The same is true also of the Papacy and 
the whole Catholic Church. The division 
of the Empire, the transference of the seat 
of authority to Constantinople, the aban- 
donment of Europe, and the incursions of 
the barbarians had left the Pope as the only 
visible sign of authority, not only in Italy 
but in all western Europe. Willingly or 
unwillingly he found himself compelled to 
exercise on his own part the double function 
of spiritual head of Christendom and the 
centre of secular authority. Whether the 
succeeding pontiffs acquitted themselves 
well of their enormous task, or ill, is not 
the question: some did, some did not, but in 
any case they played a part there was no one 
else to play, and they were the chief agents 
in bringing some semblance of order out 
of chaos, largely through the Benedictine 


[ 41 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


monks who were ready at hand in almost 
every land, the more barbarous and insecure 
the better, so far as their own inclinations 
were concerned. 

Apart from the universal conviction 
throughout Christian Europe, of the unity 
of the Church, an unity made visible 
through the identity of doctrine, discipline, 
and worship between Rome itself and the 
smallest missions on the far fringes of 
Christendom, the destruction of sense of na- 
tionality and the multitude of feudal groups 
made Rome still more the one possible 
centre of union. This enforced secular 
supremacy may possibly have been unfor- 
tunate for the Church in her spiritual as- 
pect, but the fact remains that for a thou- 
sand years she was the one fixed and in- 
variable fact in Europe, the one authority 
that remained unaffected by the rise and 
fall of kings, of dynasties, of the Empire 
itself. Heresy could not shake her, schism 
could not diminish her power. Bad bish- 
ops, recreant priests and monks, evil in- 
truders even on the chair of Peter, anti- 
popes in armed contention, all left her in 
the end just as she had been before, and 
however hopeless her case from time to 


[ 42 ] 


THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


time, reform succeeded in the end, and great 
figures like Gregory the Great, Gregory 
VII, Innocent III appeared to raise her still 
higher than before in power and in visible 
glory. Whether we like it or not, the Catho- 
lic Church remains the greatest single fact 
in human history. It is therefore hardly 
to be wondered at that for this same thou- 
sand years the Catholic Church should have 
seemed to all Christians, and should actu- 
ally have been, a greater force in secular, 
as well as in spiritual affairs, than kings and 
emperors. 

Now it was during this very period that 
culture, civilization, and the arts were born 
again, and chiefly that art of architecture 
we are considering, since it is the most 
brilliant instance of logical and consistent 
growth that is of record in the annals of 
man, reaching as it did, in the end, a su- 
preme height that staggers the imagination. 
It fell with the power that had created it, 
for the last five centuries have been of a 
temper as different from the ‘‘ Great Thou- 
sand Years” as these were different from 
paganism itself. From then on diversity in 
religion took the place of unity, the long 
contest between Church and State was de- 


[ 43 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


termined in favour of the secular power, 
and religion has become less and less a 
matter of moment. The Catholic Church 
has now taken its place in general esti- 
mation as only the largest amongst some 
one hundred and forty divisions of Chris- 
tianity, without material effect in some na- 
tions, dominant in the Medieval sense in 
none. Nationality has split Europe into 
self-conscious and mutually inimical frag- 
ments as the Reformation split Christianity; 
and of necessity therefore, the art, and very 
particularly, the architecture, of the post- 
Reformation era has been in a category by 
itself. 

In dealing then with the development of 
architecture from Charlemagne to Henry 
VIII we must first visualize for ourselves 
the Europe of that era, though admittedly 
the task is no easy one. It was in every 
great and every little respect utterly dif- 
ferent to what it is today, while it is cut off 
from us by five centuries of an entirely new 
civilization of which we are children by 
inheritance and therefore almost incapable 
of thinking back into a time with which we 
have little sympathy either by temper or by 
tendency. Summarized, the points to be 


[ 44 ] 


THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


borne in mind are these. Total extinction 
of classical civilization, with at first the 
Wiping out even of the memory thereof. A 
new race taking over the entire direction of 
affairs, of the north, northern: savage, il- 
literate, but clean in blood, inordinately 
vigorous, fresh from the cold hard shores 
of the Baltic. The extinction of civil gov- 
ernment, order, law: the substitution of 
tribal instincts for those of nationality, and 
the rapid development of a feudal system 
of personal relationships, as much in ad- 
vance of what it superseded as it differed 
therefrom. Wide extension of Christianity 
of explicitly Catholic type, with the sup- 
pression and extermination of Arianism and 
all other heresies. Unity of theological be- 
lief and religious practices, with the Papacy 
as the only recognized centre of spiritual 
authority and as the one indestructible in- 
stitution in the world. A monastic system, 
Benedictine by rule, that was rapidly ex- 
tending itself, through its innumerable 
monasteries and its equally innumerable 
missionaries, not only in Christian Europe, 
but into every neighbouring heathen land 
as well, and coming in close touch with al-_ 
_ most every man, woman, and child as reli- 


[45 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC) 


gious director, educator, civilizer, and uni- 
fying power. Such was Europe, if we use 
the term geographically; culturally, nation- 
ally, Europe was non-existent. Manners, 
morals, customs, all had fallen to the lowest 
point recorded in history; and learning, 
culture, and even decency had fled to the 
east, taking refuge with the Mohammedan 
Arabs in the Caliphate of Baghdad. Cor- 
rupt as the Papacy had become in the gen- 
eral corruption it was all there was of order 
in the west, and, vastly strengthened by 
a definite accession of temporal power 
through the conferring on Pope Stephen by 
King Pepin of the Exarchate of Ravenna 
in 756, it could at least act as a general 
unifying influence both spiritually and 
temporally. 

Against this single authority Charle- 
magne first set a new civil power, not in 
opposition but in union, and with a breadth 
of vision, a practicality of action, that shine 
singly in the long night of the Dark Ages. 
With a strong hand he reformed the 
Church, founded new monasteries, built up 
schools, fostered agriculture, and sur- 
rounded himself with all the scholars and 
artists and craftsmen he could gather from 

[ 46 ] 


THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


the four quarters of Europe: Alcuin of 
Britain, Peter of Pisa, Paul the Doctor, 
Theodaulphus of Spain, Eberhard, Hinc- 
mar, Erugena, Radbertus Maurus. 

Charlemagne was not a sudden figure of 
light and power, shot headlong, cometwise, 
through the night of the Dark Ages: he was 
rather the crest and culmination of a long, 
slow, upward sweep of recovery, the origin 
of which was far away at the very begin- 
nings of that sixth century that saw the end- 
ing of one era, the opening of another. 
When, at the hands of the Pope, he was 
crowned Emperor of the West, on Christ- 
mas Day, A.D. 800 in St. Peter’s, the highest 
point was reached in the five-century era 
we call roughly the Dark Ages. After his 
death, fourteen years later, the curve began 
to decline until it sunk again as low as be- 
fore, in order that once more, the five-hun- 
dred-year vibration being accomplished, a 
new rise might be initiated that for its own 
period of an identical number of years, 
should mark the achievement, yet in the end 
the inevitable loss, of all Charlemagne had 
striven to attain. 

He was the first great builder for five 
centuries; but of all the work in which he 


[ 47 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


was personally interested — churches, mon- 
asteries, palaces — nothing remains but the 
royal chapel at Aix-la-Chapelle, and this 
outwardly, and in a measure internally, has 
been radically rebuilt. His secretary, Eber- 
hard, built a small church at Steinbach 
which, shorn of its aisles, still remains in a 
ruinous and desecrated condition, and a few 
years later St. Michael’s, Fulda, was 
erected. The interesting gateway and 
chapel at Lorsch is fifty years later in date. 
In France the baptistery of St. Jean, Poi- 
tiers, and the unique church of Germigny- 
des-Prés are about all we have. How much 
has been destroyed that would be illuminat- 
ing on the point of architectural develop- 
ment, it is impossible to say, but there is 
little in what remains that would indicate 
irreparable loss. ‘The chapel at Aix is 
simply San Vitale at Ravenna coarsened 
and largely built of old materials. It is 
an octagon within an aisle of sixteen sides, 
with a square presbytery, two staircase 
towers, and a rectangular tribune: the vault- 
ing of the aisles is without ribs, and the 
windows are round arched and splayed. 
Of course the dome, gables, towers, and 
accessories are comparatively modern addi- 
[ 48 ] 





V. Santa Maria Macciore, ToscaNELLA 





* 


THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


tions. Einhard is usually said to have been 
the “ architect,” but Rivoira questions this, 
making him a kind of clerk of the works, 
the master-builder having come from By- 
zantium, with, working under him, Italian 
craftsmen and local Frankish labourers. 
Steinbach is equally unimaginative and even 
more primitive, a T-cross plan with aisles 
and a semicircular apse, the simplest form 
of Roman basilica, translated into the rough 
materials of a northern and barbarous land. 
Germigny-des- Pres is a curious cross-shaped 
plan in a square enclosing nave, with a small 
apse terminating each of the four arms. 
The plan is remotely Byzantine, but the ex- 
terior composition with its central tower, 
its gables, and its lean-to aisles is essentially 
northern in expression and in a distant sort 
of way may be considered, if not the proto- 
type, at least the first hesitating step in the 
direction of the development that three cen- 
turies later was to begin in power and end 
in the unexampled nobility of the Gothic 
church. The interesting and even original 
decorative scheme of inlaid stonework at 
Lorsch and at Poitiers with its abortive 
pilasters and triangular windows and steep 
decorative gables, is also of the north, but 


[ 49 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


it never led anywhere and is no more than 
the sport of ambitious incompetence. 
Charlemagne neither invented nor re- 
created a style: what he did was simply to 
stimulate into activity the moribund tradi- 
tions of building, and as well the inheritors 
of these traditions. There were still in 
Ravenna the descendants of earlier and 
more competent craftsmen; the Lombards 
had built up a building trade of sorts and 
these men were undoubtedly eager for an 
opportunity to show what they could do. 
Finally, and most important of all, were 
the Comacini. This mysterious guild is first 
referred to by name in the Code of King 
Rotharis, the Lombard, in the year 640, but 
after a manner that proves a long prior 
existence, and a century later King Liut- 
prand in an official memorandum, recog- 
nizes in detail the dignity and importance 
of its members even above all other of his 
Italian subjects. There is little doubt that 
these Comacini were the lineal successors 
of the old Roman building guilds, some 
members of which had fled to Como after 
the final ruin of the Empire and had pre- 
served somewhat of their organization and 
of their methods and traditions, handing 


[ 50 ] 


THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


them down to successive generations though 
with constantly weakening force. It is pos- 
sible that they were the progenitors of the 
order of Freemasons, but in any case they 
represent the most vigorous survival of the 
Roman building guilds and served to pre- 
serve some part of the old tradition while 
they contributed such architecture as was 
possible during the Dark Ages, until a new 
vitality in the world made inevitable a new 
art that was based on the very principles 
and methods they had saved from the gen- 
eral wreck. 

The Comacini were a true building guild 
of masons, joiners, stone carvers; organized 
in lodges, with their apprentices, work- 
men, and masters. Traditionally the north 
Italian lakes were their habitat, but they 
journeyed from place to place to undertake 
such small work as the times might de- 
mand. For several centuries they learned 
nothing and forgot much. From the great 
days of the Baths of Diocletian — that most 
amazing building that contains in embryo 
so many of the structural elements of Me- 
dieval architecture—to such poor little 
half barbarous efforts as Toscanella, is a 
fall indeed, but it is something that even 


si 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


this was possible considering that civiliza- 
tion itself had ceased, and Toscanella, with 
the similar work of the school of Ravenna, 
in eastern Italy and Dalmatia, was not only 
the last word in a long decline but the first 
of a still more amazing advance that rose 
at last to a point where even the Baths of 
Diocletian were immeasurably surpassed. 
What these building guilds did was to 
standardize architecture along simple lines 
that fitted the time; but while it so lost all 
vitality it gained in two directions: first, by 
being held always to a standard that, while 
low and tending always lower, was defi- 
nitely higher than the apology for civiliza- 
tion in which it was immersed; second, 
through the purging away of that artificial 
and illogical formalism that had been the 
last estate of a great art of building. What 
happens when a once noble art dissolves at 
last and no body of men remains to preserve 
traditions and hold to standards, we can see 
here in America between the years 1835 and 
1885. Nothing quite so bad as this occurred 
in Europe during the Dark Ages, and for 
this we must thank the Comacini and their 
fellows. We can also see in the so-called 
“classical”? architecture of the nineteenth 


[ 52 ] 


THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


century in Europe as well as America, what 
equally happens when life has gone out of a 
style, leaving it a mass of artificial dogmas 
and prejudices, and when material prosper- 
ity, instead of ruin and desolation, forms its 
environment. If ease and peace and plenty 
had followed the last decadence of Roman 
art it is hard to see how art itself could ever 
have happened again. As it was the non- 
sense was completely knocked out of it by 
adversity: for three centuries it was archi- 
tecture reduced to its lowest terms, which 
is a very good thing for this or any other 
art—or society itself, for that matter — 
whenever a drastic reform is imperative. 
In estimating the work of this period 
from the fall of Rome to the beginning of 
the ‘‘ Great Recovery ” in the eleventh cen- 
tury, when nearly all the structural features 
that underlie the great Gothic of the Middle 
Ages were to take form and shape, it must 
always be remembered that we are dealing 
with only a casual few of the structures that 
once existed. It is very tempting to 
work assiduously backward year after year 
through half forgotten fragments, finding 
at last the one where first appears some 
pregnant device later to achieve immortal- 


[53] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC. 


ity in a Durham or a Notre Dame, and to 
hail this as the actual work of genius from 
which so much was to follow. For one such 
monument that remains an hundred have 
been destroyed to tantalize us by their bare 
foundations, like St. Martin of Tours, for 
instance, that owes its destruction to the in- 
sanity of the French Revolution. What 
may have been here in these ruined sanc- 
tuaries no one can say, but at least there is 
evidence to prove not only that Gothic did 
not spring full-fledged from the marvellous 
half century between 1150 and 1200, but 
that the various elements that make up its 
organism were either the result of a slow 
development extending over centuries, or of 
the return to far-away types suggested at 
least in the later architecture of Rome it- 
self. For this reason the quarrel as to which 
church possesses the earliest ribbed vault 
is little to the point. It may be Monte- 
fiascone, or Sant’ Ambrogio, or Durham, 
but may perfectly well have been any one 
of another score of French or Lombard 
churches, no vestige of which now remains; 
moreover the fact still confronts us that in 
Syria, and even in the later buildings of the 
Roman Empire, ribbed vaults were used, 


[ 54] 


THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


and their reappearance in the eleventh cen- 
tury may be the result either of reinven- 
tion or of rediscovery of precedents long 
forgotten. 

The question therefore suggests itself: 
May we not, in pronouncing the work of the 
Dark Ages generally barren and retrogres- 
sive, be doing it injustice, just because the 
great mass of building has been utterly de- 
stroyed? ‘The chance is negligible, for the 
chapel at Aix remains and San Lorenzo 
Maggiore, Milan, in its plan and general 
structure, and we know that both were 
lauded by contemporary chroniclers as 
crowning and incredible triumphs of art. 
Undoubtedly they represent the best work 
possible to the Comacine guilds of the 
north, as Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, Pa- 
renzo, and Pomposa were the best the suc- 
cessors of the guilds of Ravenna could pro- 
duce in their own territory, and on this 
basis we can only estimate the architecture 
of the sixth and seventh centuries as dry, 
lifeless, and without invention, yet possessed 
of a certain naive seriousness and self-re- 
spect that enlist our sympathy if they cannot 
win our admiration. 

Two general plans were in vogue and 


[55] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTRte 


employed indifferently as between the 
region architecturally subject to Ravenna 
and that which fell to the lot of the Coma- 
cine masters: the basilica and the aisled and 
domed polygon. The basilica was the orig- 
inal Roman hall, with its two rows of col- 
umns supporting arches that bore the small- 
windowed clerestory, and divided the area 
into three sections, the central one being 
about double the width of the side aisles. 
In the simplest form the nave proper ends 
in a semicircular apse surmounted by a half 
dome, smaller apses for side altars being 
added later as terminations of the aisles. 
The central area was covered by a trussed 
roof of timber, the side aisles by lean-to 
roofs, and there were neither towers, domes, 
nor masonry vaults. As the churches grew 
in size an aisleless transept was added be- 
tween nave and apse to give space for richer 
ceremonial, greater numbers of clergy or 
monks, and for additional altars. So came 
the T-cross plan which is the basis of all 
Medieval church plans. This basilican 
type was practically universal under Con- 
stantine, and in the end it won, during the 
Dark Ages, supremacy in the west, quite 
displacing the circular or polygonal type. 
[ 56 ] 


THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


This latter had an eventful career. Its 
prototype may be found in certain Roman 
tombs and great apartments in the Imperial 
baths, though the analogy is somewhat 
strained, and the relation between the cali- 
darium of the Baths of Caracalla and San 
Vitale is far to seek. The first is simply a 
circular hall enclosed by enormously thick 
walls in which square and semicircular 
niches are cut, and surmounted by a low, 
ponderous dome: it is without any particu- 
lar articulation and is quite static in quality. 
The second is highly organized, with the 
load concentrated on massive piers, between 
which little arcaded apses project into an 
intricately vaulted, surrounding aisle of two 
superimposed stories. One of these apses 
is thrust through the aisle until it projects 
beyond the perimeter of the aisle wall. The 
central polygon rises well above the aisles 
and is covered by a hemispherical dome 
which is supported by large arches sub- 
divided by columns into three spaces also 
covered by arches: altogether a very rich 
and highly articulated scheme unlike any- 
thing Rome can offer in comparison. It 
seems to me an undoubted fact that the 
polygonal and domical church is a develop- 


kya 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


ment of the East, probably in the dioceses 
of Damascus and Antioch, and brought 
thence to Constantinople and Ravenna by 
master builders who we know were contin- 
ually drawn from this section by the Em- 
perors of the East. 

Whatever its source it was the chief fac- 
tor in the development of the supreme archi- 
tecture of the reign of Justinian, and 
through San Vitale, Aix-la-Chapelle and 
Sta. Maria Maggiore, Milan, had every- 
thing to do with the evolution of the Gothic 
chevet, as I shall try to show later. In it- 
self, as the general scheme for a church, it 
found scant favour in the West, yielding 
place to the basilican form, which had es- 
tablished itself in Rome, had already gone 
thence with the spreading of Christianity, 
and was by nature capable of almost in- 
definite expansion in all directions. 

Throughout the Dark Ages, then, this 
basilican form, reduced to its lowest terms, 
was the standard of building. The vast 
majesty of the Constantinian churches in 
Rome, the marble and mosaic splendours of 
the Constantinople of Justinian, the more 
sober richness of the Ravenna of the ex- 
archs were very far away, and in their place 

[ 58 ] 


ATMAUYAHOSOG Ad SHOWOAL)-LNIVS “IA 








THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


we have rough masonry of brick and stone, 
small round-arched windows with splayed 
reveals, misfit marble columns, with odds 
and ends of capitals left from ruined build- 
ings, and exteriors unornamented except 
for narrow pilaster strips, arched corbel 
courses, and sometimes, as at Agliate and 
San Vincenzo in Prato, rude arcades built 
up on the haunches of semi-domes to sup- 
port the protecting roofs. 

Of ornamental carving there is more than 
one might expect, but it usually appears in 
altar fronts and canopies, and in tombs. It 
is very flat, very conventionalized, yet deco- 
tative and with a curiously delicate feeling 
for space composition. The symbolism is 
conservatively Early Christian, the motives 
decadent Byzantine with curious Syrian 
admixtures, and here and there, as in the 
increasing frequency of dragons and wild 
beasts and birds, something that is essen- 
tially of the north. It is only here, how- 
ever, that the new barbarian blood begins 
to show itself; structurally and in point of 
architectural design the northern races, in 
spite of their universal dominion, exert no 
influence whatever. The slowly expiring 
tradition of Rome, Ravenna, and Byzan- 


[59 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


tium is still in full control, and it is not until 
the beginning of the eleventh century (that 
mystical year 1000, when the world awakes 
to new possibilities and begins the develop- 
ment of the greatest era in history) that the 
tribes of the north, Christianized, brought 
into orderly association, and subjected to 
the vital stimulus of a regenerated monas- 
ticism, begin to raise the fabric of their 
own self-expression on the foundations fur- 
nished for them by the humble builders of 
the Dark Ages. It has been a long period 
of five centuries of arduous growth, not 
into civilization but toward it. They had 
destroyed the classical culture of Rome as 
they had devastated her cities, but instead 
of inheriting her wealth and acquiring ease 
and plenty they had found themselves heirs 
to poverty, anarchy, and desolation. One 
thing they had gained which had been no 
part of their plan, and that was Christian- 
ity; and the Church, standing for five hun- 
dred years before their eyes as the one 
centre of certainty in a wilderness of change 
and hopeless disorder, had, through her 
monks and missionaries, subjected them to 
new influences that in the end must bear 
fruit in a new culture, a new civilization, 
[ 60 J 


THE AGE OF CHARLEMAGNE 


a new righteousness, and therefore a new 
art. What the results were we shall try to 
see when we take up in our next lecture 
the story of amazing advance from the mil- 
lennial year that saw the Dark Ages end 
and the great Catholic Middle Ages begin 
their triumphant career. 


[ 61 ] 


LECTURE III 
THE GREAT AWAKENING 


THE Carolingian renaissance was short- 
lived: there was always something artificial 
and predetermined about it, and it outlived 
the great Emperor scarcely a generation. 
Fourteen years after the crowning in St. 
Peter’s, he was dead and succeeded by his 
son, Louis the Pious, who was ill-fitted for 
those strenuous times. Royal quarrels 
wrecked the unstable Empire, and at the 
Treaty of Verdun it fell apart, rent verti- 
cally between France, Lorraine and Italy, 
and Germany, the second division then in- 
cluding all of what is now France east of 
the Rhone and Germany west of the Rhine, 
while Germany itself extended only as far as 
the Elbe in the north, the Danube and Save 
in the south. Brandenburg, Pomerania, and 
Prussia were still entirely barbarian, and 
destined to remain so for four centuries. 

The decline in culture and civilization 
was instant and headlong: war and anarchy 

[ 62 ] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


took the place of order, morals degenerated, 
and once more savage invaders — North- 
men in France, Huns in Germany — 
pushed on across the dissolving frontiers 
carrying fire and death and leaving wide 
ruin behind them. It was bad enough in 
France where the Vikings from their long 
ships were sweeping all the north and sail- 
ing up the Seine to sack and burn Rouen 
and Paris, and in Germany where the Huns 
were following suit, but it was worst of all 
in Italy, for there the collapse of society 
was most complete. The degradation of 
morals was so flagrant that at last the gen- 
eral corruption infected even the Church, 
which, already rent by the Eastern schism 
in 866, sank to the lowest point in its his- 
tory. ‘There were of course good bishops, 
priests, and especially monks, who had not 
abandoned themselves to simony, pluralism, 
and debauchery, but the rule was other- 
wise, and for years even the chair of Peter 
was filled by laymen and simoniacal priests 
who had won their places through bribery, 
corruption, and murder, and even, for one 
incredible period, by the bastards and 
favourites of the unspeakable Marozia and 
her Roman clan. 
[ 63 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


If the Carolingian epoch was the “ false 
dawn” of Christian civilization, the last half 
of the ninth century and the first quarter 
of the tenth formed that darkest period of 
night that comes just before the real dawn. 
For the dawn came, in the midst of a tem- 
pest of destruction, horror, and humilia- 
tion; came as irresistibly as the rising of 
the sun, and, it would seem, as independ- 
ently of human control. Just why this sud- 
den and unpredicted regeneration should 
then have shown itself with power is hard 
to say. It is sufficiently easy to understand 
why the eleventh century should have begun 
in vigour to close in glory, for by that time 
all things had been prepared, but why out 
of the horror of the ninth century should 
suddenly arise the first beginnings in the 
tenth is one of those phenomena that baffle 
the understanding of evolutionists and are 
comprehensible only to those who believe 
that the destinies of the world are under 
the guidance and control of a Supreme Om- 
niscience Who walks not by the ways of 
man but otherwise. 

In any case the change occurred and with 
startling suddenness and energy. ‘The first 
significant event, marking the sharp transi- 


[ 64 ] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


tion from one century to another, is the 
founding of the monastery of Cluny in gog. 
Since the establishing of the Order of St. 
Benedict nothing so pregnant of possibili- 
ties for the future had taken place. Cluny 
was Benedictinism, reformed, regenerated, 
and showing itself in different guise, but the 
legitimate successor of the earlier monasti- 
cism, and in itself, and through its offshoot, 
the Cistercian Order, was to act as the spir- 
itual stimulus of Europe for two centuries 
and make possible the great epoch of 
Medizvalism. 

The Cluniac Rule was promulgated in 
927, by Abbot Odo, and from that date 
Cluny became an operative and dominant 
force. In the meantime secular events of 
equal importance had taken place, for in 
919 Henry the Fowler began the Saxon 
line that was to lead to Otto the Great, and 
the resurrected Holy Roman Empire. In 
England the work and character of Alfred 
the Great were bearing fruit in a rapid in- 
crease in culture, craftsmanship, learning, 
and international influence, with St. Dun- 
stan as a type of the time and a kind of 
patron saint of all the arts from architec- 
ture to embroidery. In a way, however, 


[ 65 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


Alfred must be looked on as a later counter- 
part of Charlemagne, embodying as he did 
the low cresting of the wave of the Dark 
Ages, from 500 to 1000, rather than the 
first evidences of the new life that was to 
mark the succeeding epoch. His own era of 
advancement was short-lived; the Danish 
invasions followed, with a consequent period 
of retrogression, and the real era of Mediz- 
valism was not to begin until the Norman 
Conquest of 1066, a full century later than 
the beginnings on the Continent. 

In 936 Otto the Great became Emperor 
and under his firm hand the Hungarians 
and Slavs were beaten back, new regions 
were brought under western influence, 
Christianity crossed over the borders of 
heathen neighbours, and the new power, 
order, and dignity of the Teutonic empire 
led inevitably to the union of Germany and 
Italy and the founding of the Holy Roman 
Empire of the Germanic peoples. Hugh 
Capet in 987 wrote “finis” at the end of 
the line of degenerate Carolingians and 
established the Capetian dynasty, while 
Denmark in 935 and Poland in 966 had 
accepted Christianity and marked their 
submission by enthroning Christian kings. 

[ 66 | 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


Nor must the influence of the Arabs be dis- 
regarded. From their capitol at Cordova, 
a centre of education, learning, science, and 
culture, a vital and stimulating force had 
extended itself over all western Europe, 
curiously combining with the new Catholic 
and monastic spirit, to give a fresh impetus 
to renascent civilization. Finally, in the 
very last year of the tenth century, the degra- 
dation of the Papacy received its first check 
through Pope Sylvester II, who was fol- 
lowed by Benedict VIII, and, after the 
scandalous relapse of John XIX and Bene- 
dict IX, by such great leaders and true 
shepherds as Clement II, Leo IX, and 
Hildebrand Pope Gregory VII, the last one 
of the very great figures in history and the 
corner-stone of the Medieval Church. 
From the beginning the monks of Cluny 
had been the chief influence toward right- 
eousness, steadfast even when the Papacy 
itself was renegade and rotten, and in the 
end lifting it to their own lofty plane of 
thought, conduct, and action. Partly be- 
cause of this faithfulness (which was pre- 
served and even intensified by the succeed- 
ing Cistercians, Carthusians, and Augus- 
tinians, and even later by the Dominicans 
[ 67 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


and Franciscans), the “‘ regulars ” or monas- 
tic clergy not only acquired power and in- 
fluence, together with the confidence and 
affection of the people, far above that of 
the secular or parochial clergy, but they 
dominated and controlled the episcopate 
and even the Papacy itself. For a time 
Cluny was more powerful than the Pope, 
and so was Clairvaux in its turn, and as 
the first took charge of the Normans, Chris- 
tianizing them and making Normandy the 
greatest centre of energy in Europe, so the 
second seized upon the Franks and gave to 
them the task, and the ability to accomplish 
it, of perfecting what Normandy had 
initiated. 

Between them they created the Christian 
civilization of the Middle Ages, monasti- 
cism in two diverse forms working through 
two races of diverse blood, but both essen- 
tially of the north; Norman on the one 
hand, French and Burgundian on the 
other. The expression of this civilization 
in artistic form was, first, Norman archi- 
tecture, second, the Gothic architecture of 
the Ile de France. 

The experience of every student of 
Medizvalism is, I think, a first return to 

[ 68 ] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


the thirteenth century as the centre of in- 
terest and enthusiasm, then an immediate 
working back to the twelfth century as 
representing something far more massive, 
vigorous, and significant, and finally an 
almost enforced return to the eleventh cen- 
tury. The thirteenth, well called by Dr. 
Walsh “the greatest of centuries,” was an 
era of glorious accomplishment, but in it 
were already showing the first evidences of 
dissolution. ‘The twelfth was the century 
of magnificent endeavour, and all that was 
great in its successor is here in embryo, not 
alone in art but in philosophy, religion, and 
the conduct of life. The eleventh century 
is a time of aspiration and of vision, of the 
enunciation of new principles and of the 
first shock of contest between the old that 
was doomed, the new that was destined to 
unprecedented victories. Great leaders 
suddenly arise out of an age without lead- 
ers: Henry II, Henry IV, Edmund I[ron- 
sides, Edward the Confessor, William the 
Conqueror, Boleslav of Poland, Olaf of 
Sweden, Sancho the Great of Navarre, 
Pope Sylvester II, Leo IX, Gregory VII, 
St. Anselm, Lanfranc, St. Peter Damian, 
Fulbert of Chartres, Bernward of Hildes- 


[ 69 | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


heim, Guido Arretino, Avicenna; monas- 
teries and convents on the reformed lines 
of Cluny were springing up on every hand, 
redeeming the wilderness, spreading edu- 
cation, establishing works of mercy and 
charity. 

The civilization of the eleventh century 
was monastic, feudal, and predominantly 
Norman. Its vitality was prodigious. At 
every point the heathen assaults had been 
beaten back, the peril of the false prophet 
was apparently at an end, and the northern 
tribes, whether Teutonic, Norse, Saxon, or 
Frank, had been Christianized and partly 
assimilated, excepting always the still 
heathen tribes of Prussia and Brandenburg. 
Feudalism had saved Europe with the aid 
of St. Benedict and his monks: now the 
reformed Benedictines of Cluny were to 
redeem it, with the Christianized Vikings 
of Normandy as their efficient arm. Origi- 
nally the most savage of peoples they had 
perforce followed their Duke Richard when 
he accepted Christianity in 961, and in two 
generations had become the most zealous 
and active adherents of the Church. In the 
first half of the eleventh century, twenty 
great monasteries, including three of world- 


[ 70 ] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


wide influence (Bec, Fécamp, and Ju- 
miéges), were founded in Normandy alone, 
and into Britain, Italy, Sicily, the Levant, 
streamed the Norman adventurers, light- 
heartedly, high-handedly, seizing on degen- 
erate counties and dukedoms, cutting out 
new kingdoms for themselves and generally 
becoming both a public nuisance and an 
agency of regeneration. 

It must all have been very unpleasant for 
the upholders of the ancien régime, the 
simoniacal Popes, absentee bishops, and 
married or profligate clergy; for the degen- 
erate feudal lords, the fainéant kings, and 
the Emperors both of the West and the East 
who had, as they thought, safely brought 
the great engine of the Church under their 
direct and personal control. Never was 
such an upheaval, such a rattling of the dry 
bones of wide decrepitude by militant 
monks hot with the zeal of reform, and 
Norman, Frankish, and Flemish adven- 
turers whose headstrong careers were em- 
bellished by an equally headstrong religious 
ardour. In the end Europe proved too 
small for the exuberant vitality of a north 
that suddenly had found itself, and the riot 
of action culminated, just as the century 


ae 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


closed, in the astonishing spectacle of the 
First Crusade. 

Of course art answered to the exciting 
stimulus, as it always does when the driving 
impulse is based on fundamental things. 
Music, from about 1030, developed on new 
and brilliant lines; at the very beginning of 
the century nuns in their Rhenish cloisters 
were writing Latin comedies; in Hildes- 
heim and Liége the arts of metal achieved 
a sudden and amazing splendour, sculpture 
began its recovery in the south of France, 
while architecture opened like an expand- 
ing flower, not only in Normandy, but in 
France, Burgundy, the Rhineland, and 
every quarter of Italy from Lombardy to 
Calabria and Sicily. | 

Three tendencies show themselves, or 
rather we should say, three schools develop, 
for the tendency of all was at first the same, 
though one of the schools was short-lived 
and played little part in the later develop- 
ments of the other two which, merged at 
last, furnished all of Gothic except the 
vitalizing spirit. These three schools were 
those of Tuscany, Lombardy, and Nor- 
mandy. The first, which was sporadic and 
of very brief duration, is mysterious and 


72] 


soma 


ae 





if 
4 
2 
iz . 


Porcu, San GILLES 


Vit; 





tai GREAT AWAKENING 


almost inexplicable, and is represented, 
amongst existing buildings, by San Miniato 
and the Baptistery in Florence, and, in a 
measure, by Pisa Cathedral. This work is 
generally included under the generic title 
‘““Lombard,” but this seems to me a mistake, 
for it is structurally and esthetically dif- 
ferent from the true Lombard work of the 
same period. Certain common elements 
are visible, for example, qualities that are 
conspicuously Syrian, but the things that, 
in Lombard architecture, are traceable to 
Ravenna, or to the Comacine guilds, do not 
appear at all. Structurally this Tuscan 
work is static, while its rival is constantly 
progressing through one experiment after 
another until it arrives at a point where 
its new and pregnant devices are taken over 
by the Franks and made into Gothic. In 
craftsmanship it is vastly superior to the 
nascent art of the Lombards, clean-cut, deli- 
cate, classical, while its inlaid, polychro- 
matic ornament is in a class by itself. You 
cannot call it Ravennesque, still less can 
you call it Byzantine; in a sense it is classi- 
cal Greek, though strongly modified by an 
Eastern influence and adapted to the new 
environment of a Christian society. Bishop 


yee 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTmae 


Hildebrand began San Miniato in 1013, but 
there is no record of the name of the master 
builder. He could have been no local genius, 
for no building exists in Tuscany, or has 
been recorded, that resembles it in the least. 
It is not a direct successor of the Roman 
basilica, for it shows an articulation of a 
high order and is manifestly the result of 
many generations of development. It bears 
not the slightest relation to Toscanella, and 
as for the Comacini, a glance at Sant’ 
Abondio, Como, exactly contemporary in 
date, dispels all thought of authorship on 
their part. It seems to be the work of some 
Greek artist from Syria, for with its divi- 
sion into three square bays of three arched 
openings each, separated by piers carrying 
transverse arches across nave and _ aisles 
alike, it has a close resemblance to certain 
ruined churches of the diocese of Antioch 
of a period antedating the work of Justinian 
at Constantinople. The Florentine Bap- 
tistery is of the same temper, Syrian Greek 
as opposed both to Byzantium and Ravenna; 
but the Duomo of Pisa, while Syrian in 
plan and containing many Hellenic quali- 
ties, is also touched by Lombard influences. 
Pisa is the direct prototype of that very beau- 


[74] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


tiful round-arched style of the Italian thir- 
teenth century which is the true “ Gothic ” 
or Medieval expression of Italy, rather 
than the superficially Gothic incidents that 
are so generally unsuccessful and are usu- 
ally taken to express this particular period. 

This combination of Greek and Syrian 
influences is what one would have expected, 
for Constantinople and Syria were still the 
leading centres of culture in the world, 
apart from the Arabs, who, as infidels, were 
formal enemies. During the era of the 
Ottos the connection between the Empire 
and the East was very close, while southern 
Italy was still an appanage of Constanti- 
nople. The Empress Theophano was a 
daughter of the Eastern Emperor, wife of 
Otto II and mother of Otto III. In her 
train came artisans and artists of all kinds 
from Constantinople, and great stores of 
woven and embroidered stuffs, metal work, 
and carved ivories. Great as was this in- 
fluence from the Bosporus, that which fil- 
tered in from Syria was of equal magnitude, 
and, at least so far as southern France was 
concerned, even more penetrating and per- 
manent in its effects. 

All through the Dark Ages Syria was the 


Ps 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GODRie 


most fertile and wealthy province of the 
Eastern Empire and the Syrian merchants 
were the chief Mediterranean navigators. 
Through Marseilles and Arles these mer- 
chants with their ivories, stuffs, jewels, and 
wines, worked their way into all parts of 
Gaul and even into the valley of the Rhine, 
making permanent settlements not only in 
the towns of Provence but in Worms, Metz, 
Cologne. One rather gathers from St. 
Jerome and Salvianno and Gregory of 
Tours that they were somewhat of a nui- 
sance, as they were clannish, industrious, 
and inordinately avaricious. Whatever 
wealth there was seems to have been largely 
concentrated in their hands, but at least 
they played a powerful part in the develop- 
ment of art when it began to recover itself 
in the eleventh century, though their con- 
tributions were purely decorative, and had 
little to do with the great structural revo- 
lution that was begun by the Lombards, 
continued by the Normans and completed 
by the French. 

Certain of these decorative importations 
may well be the norm of definite Gothic 
devices, as, for example, crockets, which 
were long supposed to be Teutonic in their 

[ 76 ] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


origin, but which are to be found in Caro- 
lingian illuminations almost copied from 
such Syrian manuscripts as the Rabula 
Gospels. ‘he twin flanking towers of the 
west front of churches may be traced di- 
rectly back from Coutances and York 
through the Norman abbeys, to Como and 
Sant’ Ambrogio, and through ivories, gems, 
and miniatures of the fifth century and of 
Syrian workmanship, to Syria itself, where 
they form the established type. 

The second school is that of Lombardy, 
interesting, vital, and significant. If San 
Pietro, Toscanella, is really eighth century 
even in part, it is one of the earliest build- 
ings of this style, though its strikingly 
beautiful facade must be credited to a 
period nearly five centuries later when it 
attained its highest point. The church at 
Agliate is a century later and San Vin- 
cenzo in Prato, Milan, of the same date, 
i.e. the first half of the ninth century. Then 
in steady progression come such architectur- 
ally and archzologically important monu- 
ments as Sant’ Eustorgio, Milan; Santo Ste- 
fano, Verona; Sant’ Abondio, Como; San 
Flaviano, Montefiascone; and Sant’ Ambro- 
gio, Milan. Now, the earliest of these are 


[77] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GODRiG 


of the Dark Ages, and in them is no sign 
of life or invention, but from Sant’ Eus- 
torgio onward the churches I have named 
are all of the eleventh century and in one 
or the other may be found the earliest stages 
in the working out of many of the structural 
features that conditioned the Gothic style 
of architecture. Here, in this brief space 
of time, we may find the full development 
of the compound pier from the cylindrical 
column, the alternating system, the concen- 
tration of loads and thrusts with their neces- 
sary buttresses, the pointed, ribbed, and 
domical vault, and even the beginnings of 
the chevet itself. 

This development of the original ba- 
silican plan and organism until it finally 
culminated at the hands of other races 
and far in the north, was somewhat as 
follows: 

The supply of ancient marble columns 
being exhausted, circular or square piers 
built up of small stones were substituted. 
At about the same time arches were thrown 
across the aisles from each pier to the outer 
wall, possibly for esthetic reasons, more 
probably for purposes of stability. In any 
case they involved the addition of a pilaster 


[ 78 ] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


to the pier to take the arch on its inner side, 
and so the first step toward the compound 
pier was accomplished. Next, great and 
high arches were flung across the nave, 
partly for stability, partly because of their 
beauty. These arches were either on every 
third pier, as at San Miniato, or on every 
alternate pier. In either case an additional 
pilaster was built on the pier that bore the 
nave arch, so making it cruciform, while 
the intermediate support, having less work 
to do, was made smaller. Thus the alter- 
nating system of the late Norman and early 
Gothic was begun, while the scaffolding 
had been prepared for the next innovation, 
which was masonry vaulting. This began 
first in the small areas of the side aisles, and 
was plainly groined, without ribs. Almost 
immediately the structural convenience of 
ribs was either rediscovered or remem- 
bered from the Baths of Diocletian, or 
copied from Syria, and after this the whole 
scheme of Gothic construction was inevi- 
table. The ribs made elaborate centring no 
longer necessary, since they were built first 
and then the spaces simply filled with thin 
stones from the haunch upward. ‘This sim- 
_ plification made the high vault possible, and 


[79 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF (GO Tie 


this at first was quadripartite, or just the 
space of two of the aisle arches. Which was. 
the first ribbed and pointed nave vault is 
a question that is archeological rather than 
architectural. ‘That it was not earlier than 
1025 or later than 1075 we are reasonably 
sure. The vault of Sant’ Ambrogio is of 
the year 1060 and so perfect it is surely not 
the first. Venturi, Stiehl, Lethaby believe 
this ribbed, pointed, and domed vault to be 
a Norman invention, and others claim that 
Durham in England is the first. It does 
not really matter, the feat had been accom- 
plished, and that is really all we need to 
know. 

Already we have a definite concentration 
of loads on certain points, and esthetic rec- 
ognition of this new principle. This in- 
volved a new scheme of buttressing, for 
while the thick Roman walls of the aisles 
had served to take the thrust of the trans- 
verse aisle arches, the nave arches, particu- 
larly when stone vaults were added, were 
a different matter. Naturally the first step 
was to build transverse walls across the 
aisles, piercing these with arched openings, 
as at Sant? Ambrogio. This is as far as the 
Lombards went; the flying buttress was the 


[ 80 ] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


final structural refinement of the Normans 
and the Franks. 

The chevet, the development of which 
is an interesting and rather special story, I 
shall take up later. ‘The Lombards ven- 
tured a few tentative steps in this direction, 
but the real work was apparently done far- 
ther north, and is twelfth century rather 
than eleventh. 

/tsthetically the Lombards were as suc- 
cessful as they were structurally. ‘The great 
glory of the style they had initiated was to 
come in the twelfth century in the churches 
of Modena, Pavia, Parma, Murano, and in 
the thirteenth century in Pisa, Lucca, Pis- 
toja, but even in the eleventh century the 
self-restrained simplicity of the ordinary 
exteriors, with their narrow pilaster strips, 
corbelled cornices, simple round-arched 
windows, and primitive apse arcades, is very 
notable. 

It is an interesting and a significant fact 
that as in the north the rebirth of culture 
and civilization is directly traceable to the 
great spiritual awakening that took form 
and shape in Cluny, so here in Italy the 
growth of a new art is consonant with a 
similar religious revival, stimulated by 


[ 81 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


Cluny itself, though following a somewhat 
different and less permanent form of devel- 
opment. Cluny was based on the “ com- 
munity spirit” and was made up of 
self-contained groups of men united under 
one rule. In Italy the horrors of the tenth 
century drove thinking and righteous men 
out of the world and into the wilderness as 
hermits, and though the influence of these 
pious anchorites was enormous it was per- 
sonal only and could not outlast their lives. 
St. Nilus of Calabria and St. Romuald of 
Ravenna are types of the holy men of the 
time, and the latter, says Villari, made 
Ravenna for a time almost a rival in sanc- 
tity of Cluny itself. Princes, patricians, a 
Doge of Venice, St. Adalbert of Bohemia 
(who was martyred by the heathen Prus- 
sians he had laboured to convert) sought in 
the far solitudes release from the intoler- 
able oppression of social degeneration; and 
they, with Gerbert, Bishop of Ravenna 
after 998, exerted a vast influence for good 
on the second and third Ottos as Holy 
Roman Emperors. St. Romuald, in fact, 
had hopes of inducing Otto III to renounce 
the crown of empire and become a hermit, 
but for once he failed, and this prince, who 


[ 82 ] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


through his enlightenment and spiritual fer- 
vour might have been the regenerator of 
Europe in its civil aspect, died at the age 
of twenty-two, followed two months later 
by Pope Sylvester, Otto’s counterpart in the 
Church, and disorder reigned again. The 
impulse had been sufficient however, and 
now in Italy, as in Normandy, to quote the 
contemporary monk, Rudolf of Cluny, “ It 
was as though the earth, rousing itself and 
casting away its ancient vesture, clothed 
itself with the white robe of churches.” 

The third school is that of Normandy. 
It owes nothing to the neo-Grec episode 
of Tuscany, but it took over all the Lom- 
bard school and, striking out for itself, by 
the vigour of the new northern blood and 
the impulse and insistence of Cluny, as- 
sembled it all, organized it in a splendid 
coherency, carried each new thing to a 
logical conclusion, supplemented these by 
additional devices of the highest genius, and 
finally handed the whole noble work to the 
Franks and their Cistercian guides to be 
raised to the highest point of logical articu- 
lation and given that distinct and unique 
esthetic quality that fixed in everlasting 
form the Gothic style. 


[ 83 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


In searching for the earliest beginnings 
of this era-making work we are grievously 
handicapped by the gross and wanton sacri- 
lege of the French Revolution. Innumer- 
able great works of the noblest art suffered 
total destruction during the eighteenth 
century anarchy; amongst them three of 
unique value both artistically and arche- 
ologically: Cluny, Saint-Benigne of Dijon; 
and Saint-Martin of Tours. A fourth in 
the sequence, Jumiéges, was also shattered 
and laid desolate by the same sans-culottes, 
but fortunately still remains as a majestical 
ruin, while Cérisy-la-Forét was by some 
miracle overlooked. 

The name and personality of the first of 
the great line of builders, and himself the 
greatest of all, are known and should be 
honoured by all architects. William of Vol- 
piano was born in 961 on a little island of 
Lake Orta in Italy. When very young he 
became a monk of Cluny, then at the age of 
twenty-nine Abbot of Saint-Benigne, Dijon, 
and a few years later, at the personal solici- 
tation of Richard II of Normandy, Abbot 
of Fécamp. Filled with the most ardent 
zeal for the reformation of morals, both 
secular and religious, he was apparently a 

[ 84 ] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


master builder—or, as we should say, 
architect — of amazing ability. The lost 
abbey of Dijon was his work, also the 
abbey church of Bernay (now desecrated, 
partially razed, and used for all manner of 
base purposes), Frutuaria in Italy, and a 
number of destroyed and less important 
monuments. The original abbey church at 
Mont-Saint-Michel was constructed during 
his lifetime and under the direction of his 
disciple, Abbot Hildebert II; Cérisy-la- 
Foret by the famous monk Durandus, also 
a disciple, and by Almodus, who had been 
clerk of the works at Mont-Saint-Michel. 
Jumiéges, if not his actual creation, was 
built under his influence by yet another apt 
pupil, Robert II, then abbot, and after- 
ward both Bishop of London and Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury. Finally the preg- 
nant transitional work of the early twelfth 
century was under the inspiration of Lan- 
franc, who, born at Pavia in 1005, became 
a monk of Bec in 1042, only nine years after 
the death of William of Volpiano. 

The loss of Saint-Benigne is irreparable: 
it marked the first advent in the north of 
the Lombard principles; it formed the point 
of contact between Italy and France, and, 

[85 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


judging from its foundations, which are all 
the revolutionists have left us, and from 
most defective drawings, it was an unique 
stage in the development of the Gothic 
chevet. It was a T-cross basilica, with apse 
and flanking absidioles; a great circular 
church or rotunda adjoined it to the east, 
and by two rings of columns was divided 
into a central well with two vaulted gal- 
leries, while again to the east was a quad- 
rangular chapel forming the tomb of the 
saint. ‘he importance of this building can- 
not be overestimated, and a glance at the 
conjectural plan will show how, in the year 
1002, it amazingly foreshadows the fully 
developed cathedral of the thirteenth cen- 
tury. Undoubtedly its resemblance to the 
Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusa- 
lem links it also with the school of Syria. 
Bernay, constructed in 1013, is the true 
beginning of the Norman style, lofty, mas- 
sive, masculine: a Latin cross with deep 
chancel (instead of the Italian T-cross), 
with compound piers and archivolts, ambu- 
latories in the thickness of the walls, and 
the full order of arcade, triforium, and 
clerestory, though the triforium arches were 
later blocked up. Mont-Saint-Michel is 
[ 86 ] 





VIII. Sant’? AmBrocio, Mian 


Ry 





THE GREAT AWAKENING 


next in order, and proceeds in richness and 
articulation beyond Bernay, from which it 
was copied, while here for the first time 
the walls are reduced in thickness and but- 
tresses are substituted — a vital change, the 
significance of which is inestimable. 
Cérisy-la-Forét and Jumiéges supple- 
ment each other, for in the former the west 
front and towers, with five bays of the nave, 
have been destroyed, while in the latter the 
original apse was supplanted by an elabo- 
rate chevet in the fourteenth century, and 
this wholly disappeared at the Revolution, 
leaving hardly more than the nave and 
west front structurally intact. These two 
churches are momentous in the history of 
architectural development. Ceérisy is artic- 
ulated beyond everything achieved before; 
it is a Latin cross with a polygonal apse, 
wide transepts, and aisled nave and choir. 
It looks to be of the same date as Saint 
Georges de Boscherville, and therefore later 
than Jumiéges, but this does not help us 
much, since it is not sure whether the 
former church is of 1050 or 1110. It cer- 
tainly is more delicate in design than 
Jumiéges, but on the other hand the aisles 
and triforia of Jumiéges are vaulted, which 


[ 87 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


is a sign of increasing confidence and ability 
on the part of its creators. Rivoira is ex- 
plicit in his statement that it was conse- 
crated in 1032 and that Durandus was the 
architect: on the other hand Rupricht 
Robert dates it 1150, and Porter comes be- 
tween with a guess at 1130. From the evi- 
dence of the building itself I should incline 
to the very end of the eleventh century. In 
any case it is a very noble work of art with 
many elements of transcending importance, 
e.g. the alternating system with transverse 
nave arches at every other pier, the apse 
with three stories of windows and wall pas- 
sages at the two upper levels, and the finely 
developed square central tower. If it is 
earlier than Jumiéges, it is the first church 
in the north to adopt the Lombard trans- 
verse arches across the nave, — the first step 
toward the Gothic high vault and the sex- 
partite form; if later, then the same is true 
of Jumiéges, which was certainly built in 
1040. In both cases all the previous steps 
toward the development of the Gothic sys- 
tem have been brought together, while the 
proportions have become lofty and noble, 
the parts admirably related, and the whole 
infused with a certain poetical quality 
[ 88 ] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


hitherto unknown. I am persuaded that 
Jumiéges originally had alternating trans- 
verse nave arches, like Cérisy, though I be- 
lieve no one has suggested this before. Its 
western towers are of extraordinary beauty 
of composition and outline, but the end of 
the nave between is crude and undeveloped 
and is, I imagine, something left over from 
a much earlier church. 

We are now ready to go on to the de- 
velopment of the true Gothic style, and in 
doing so IJ shall deliberately transfer to the 
next lecture consideration of the Norman 
churches of Lanfranc and after, for even 
if they fall within the eleventh century and 
are in themselves the crowning of the Nor- 
man style, they are also precisely those 
structures in which the principle of dead 
loads is being transformed into that of con- 
centrated weights and living thrusts, there- 
fore an essential part of the development 
of the earliest Gothic. 

First, however, a word should be given to 
two other local types of architecture in this 
very wonderful eleventh century, though 
neither ever had any distinctive influence 
in the later and perfected art of Europe. 
These are the Venetian school and that of 


[ 89 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


the Rhine. In Venice the weaving of the 
‘white robe of churches” gave us that im- 
mortal concentration of beauty, San Marco, 
through an apparently deliberate rejection 
of both the Ravenna and the Lombard 
schools and a return to Byzantium, for the 
church itself was a fairly close copy of the 
Church of the Holy Apostles of Justinian. 
This strong Eastern influence persisted in 
Venice quite through the Middle Ages, re- 
sulting in a local architecture of exquisite 
beauty, secular as well as religious. By 
some sport of fancy the same model was 
followed at Saint-Front, Périgueux, while 
the Venetian influence extended to Padua 
on the mainland, and across the Adriatic to 
the Dalmatian colonies. Beautiful as it all 
was it was outside the line of European 
development, and whenever, as at Padua, 
it tried to adapt itself to other conditions 
it lost all vitality and rapidly died in a con- 
dition of dull inertia. Later, in Sicily, 
under the stimulating influence of the Nor- 
man conquerors, similar Byzantine motives 
were adopted with brilliant results, but 
here also the effect was confined within the 
island walls and did not extend itself either 
geographically or in point of time. 


[ 90 ] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


In the Rhineland the year tooo brought 
the same revival that it miraculously seemed 
to confer on the rest of Europe. Otto III 
was emperor, the Italian influence increas- 
ingly powerful, while Cluny was as opera- 
tive as elsewhere. As we have seen, the 
Syrian element was strong all through the 
Rhineland, the Empress-Mother, Theo- 
phano, had all the love for beauty of her 
native East, while much of the Comacine 
work of Charlemagne was still standing as 
a series of models. In general the eleventh 
century building was not notably differen- 
tiated from that in Lombardy, Burgundy, 
and Normandy, and such a church as St. 
Michael’s, Hildesheim, is quite capable of 
holding its own with the best these countries 
could show during the first quarter of the 
eleventh century. The same is true of 
St. Maria im Capitol, the plan of which is 
quite unique, with apsidal terminations for 
the choir and both transepts and aisles en- 
tirely encircling all three, this being the 
first record of aisles carried along both sides 
of the chancel and around the apse as well. 
The apsidal transepts were copied once or 
twice later, but they never became popular. 
This is true of all the Teutonic contribu- 

[91 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


tions to contemporary church building. 
From the time of the Abbey of St. Gall it 
had been a German fashion to duplicate the 
eastern apse at the west end of the church, 
and sometimes the transept also: the result 
was a composition without unity or focus, 
and the miscellaneous collection of towers 
that inevitably followed produced a chaotic 
and unimpressive effect. Nothing of this 
extended itself either to France or England, 
and after its first eflorescence the Rhenish 
style froze into the dull severity of Speyer, 
Worms, Mainz, and Coblenz, a severity 
that broke up outside into an unintelligent 
chaos of towers, spires, and domes encrusted 
with mechanical and uninspired detail. 

In itself the church building of the 
eleventh and twelfth centuries in the Rhine- 
land lacked all spontaneity of structural 
development: ingenious in devising new 
combinations of apses, towers, and arcades, 
it contented itself with this, and with the 
construction of cathedrals impressive be- 
cause of their colossal dimensions. The 
universal problem was, however, the per- 
fecting of a scheme of construction that 
should be logical, organic, highly articu- 
lated, and, a little later, economical. All 


[ 92 ] 


THE GREAT AWAKENING 


the materials were at hand, gathered from 
Syria, Ravenna, Constantinople, Rome; 
they had been analyzed, assorted, developed 
into new significance and assembled into 
units already showing a life and movement 
unknown for five centuries. The next step 
after development of detail and co-ordina- 
tion of effort was creation, and high- 
heartedly the men of Normandy and 
Burgundy and France and England set 
themselves to their task. 


[93 ] 


LECTURE IV 
THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


IN my last lecture I considered the bril- 
liant achievements of the first great builder 
of the eleventh century in the north, Wil- 
liam of Volpiano, and of those who imme- 
diately carried on his principles. We now 
must turn to a second figure of equal archi- 
tectural significance, Lanfranc of Bec, who 
carried still further the ideas of the great 
master and was his immediate and most 
able successor. Like William he was an 
Italian, born in Pavia in 1005. At the age 
of thirty-four he went to Avranches, where 
he established one of the many schools of 
this fertile time, but almost immediately 
abandoned his educational work for the 
cloister, and became a monk of Bec in 1042. 
The result was momentous, for at once this 
minor monastery became the intellectual 
centre of Europe, drawing professors from 
every part of the west, and students in such 
numbers that the old buildings proved in- 

[ 94 ] 


THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


adequate, and were at once replaced by 
magnificent new structures designed by 
Lanfranc himself —so far as we know his 
first essay in architecture. 

It may seem to you that I disprove my 
own contention when [| admit that the two 
great architectural masters in northern 
Europe in the eleventh century, the very 
men who took over the Lombard innova- 
tions and not only co-ordinated them but 
gave them a new and transcendent character 
as the logical steps toward an inevitable 
Gothic, were not men of the north at all 
but Italians, and you may say therefore that 
it is to Italy and the classical south, not 
to Normandy and the Catholic north, that 
credit should be given for this era-making 
work. It should be remembered, however, 
that the real creative ability in Italy was 
Lombard, i.e. of that region where the old 
Latin race had been almost wholly super- 
seded by northern, and semi-Norse, semi- 
Teutonic tribes, and that William of Vol- 
piano and Lanfranc were both undeniably 
of this alien blood. On the other hand it 
is sure that this northern force, so vast in 
its vigour and potentiality, would never 
have become operative but for the fertiliz- 


[95 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


ing power of the indestructible classical 
tradition which had lain fallow through the 
centuries of devastation, only to assert itself 
with something of its old vigour when con- 
ditions had become favourable. | 

It is impossible too strongly to emphasize 
the persistence and the beneficence of this 
classical heritage, which from time to time 
asserts itself through alien races and in alien 
times. It came with power in the tenth 
and eleventh centuries, again in the four- 
teenth and fifteenth, and it is no hard task 
for us, today, to see its recrudescence again 
after the powerfully Teutonic epoch of the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ever 
since the Latin tradition was apparently 
stamped out forever under the trampling 
of Teutonic conquest, it has been those 
peoples. who were earlier under its civiliz- 
ing influence that have come forward as 
centres of culture and of creative force, and 
of social dynamics. Italy, Spain, France, 
Britain, the Rhineland, all are coheritors of 
the classical tradition, and Russia herself 
owes her religion, her philosophy, and her 
art to that eastern Rome on the shores of 
the Bosporus that, before many days, may 
become the capital of a restored and even 


[ 96 | 


THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


more glorious Byzantine Empire. The 
eastern half of Germany, Hungary, and 
Scandinavia are the only countries of Eu- 
rope that never knew in any degree the 
influence of Latin culture and civilization, 
and the lack can never be supplied from 
any human source whatever. 

Again, we may admit that the blood of 
the Mediterranean races had exhausted 
itself and was no longer able to utilize its 
own tradition. Of its own motion the 
clean blood of the northern tribes could 
probably have done little, but the combin- 
ing of the two forces, raised to creative ac- 
tivity by the inspiration of a vital, personal, 
and beautiful religion, resulted in a living 
force of unexampled potentiality, and the 
result was the culture and the philosophy 
and the art of Medizvalism. 

William and Lanfranc, then, were the 
bearers of a great wonder out of Italy, but 
it was the lusty Normans and the ardent 
Franks who gave it form and life. 

Not one stone remains on another of 
Lanfranc’s new buildings at Bec, and of his 
abbey of the Trinité at Caen only the crypt 
exists, as the present church is the result 
of a rebuilding half a century later. The 


[97 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


Abbaye aux Hommes, or St. Etienne, at 
Caen, therefore stands as Lanfranc’s first 
undoubted work. The easterly portion was 
consecrated in 1077, the western in 1081, 
and it was built (together with the original 
Trinité) by Duke William of Normandy, 
the “‘ Conqueror,” in expiation of some of 
his rebellions against ecclesiastical inhibi- 
tions. There is a tradition that the second 
of these churches records the remorse of 
the impulsive duke for his harshness to his 
Duchess Matilda in parading through the 
streets of Caen with the lady tied by the 
hair to the tail of his horse, as an evidence 
of his annoyance at her domestic conduct. 
This story probably does grave injustice 
to William as well as to the manners of the 
time, even though these were more forcible, 
direct, and unconventional than happened 
at a later date. 

This church, while following generally 
the type of Jumiéges, is a long step in ad- 
vance, both structurally and artistically. It 
is a vast Latin cross, with a high and fully 
developed triforium gallery roofed by an 
half barrel vault, compound piers of richly 
multiplied section and on the alternating 
system, central and western towers, and, for 


[ 98 ] 





,ERMO 


Pat 


CaPpELLA PALaTINA, 


IX. 





THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


the first time (if we assign to Cérisy-la- 
Forét its probable later date) a conscious 
effort at giving to the exterior decorative 
architectural quality and some expression 
of inner organism. For the first time also 
we find the three west doors given an archi- 
tectural character, and forming the first step 
toward the ultimate glory of the typical 
French west portals. ‘The crude sexpartite 
vaulting of the nave is of the twelfth cen- 
tury, for while Lanfranc evidently intended 
to vault his church throughout, his courage 
or his workmen failed him, and he had to 
be content with a wooden roof, possibly with 
alternating transverse arches as at Jumiéges 
and Cérisy. St. Nicholas, Caen, is also 
Lanfranc’s work: here the choir was actu- 
ally covered by ribless cross vaulting; the 
triforium is much reduced in importance, 
as later at the Trinité in Caen and Saint 
Georges de Boscherville, and finally—after 
a return to the earlier form—jin the 
standard type of Gothic church, while the 
architectural treatment of the exterior is 
still further developed in articulation. Saint 
Georges de Boscherville is of the same genus 
and follows after, probably in the very last 
years of the century or the first of the next. 


[ 99 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


In spite of the most shocking “ restora- 
tions’ of the end of the nineteenth century 
which have transformed its interior into a 
whitewashed and mechanical horror, Saint 
Georges is— or was—a church of great 
nobility and finesse of proportion. Its ar- 
cade is lofty and fine in form, its triforium 
low and cut into a level arcade by close-set 
shafts and narrow arches; the tribunes of 
the transepts are beautifully designed, while 
the exterior is admirable in mass and logical 
and vigorous in detail. The apse was 
originally vaulted with a simple half-dome, 
and the choir with plain, unribbed cross 
vaulting; the present nave vault is of the 
thirteenth century, but originally it was 
spanned by great arches, not, as before, on 
alternating piers, but on all, so forming a 
stage of development toward the oblong 
vaulting, as opposed to cross vaulting or 
sexpartite, of the Gothic church. 

It isin England, however, that Lanfranc’s 
greatest works were realized. This is emi- 
nently fitting since the successful invasion 
of England by his duke was due more to 
him than to anyone else, for it was his bril- 
liant mind and indomitable will and soaring 
ambition that used the courage of William 

[ 100 ] 


THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


as its tool and in the end made of him a 
great statesman as well as a daring adven- 
turer. To England Lanfranc went, now as 
Archbishop of Canterbury, and there, by 
the year 1077, he had built a new cathedral, 
some portions of which still remain incor- 
porated in the vastly extended and many 
times rebuilt metropolitan church of Eng- 
land. Lanfranc’s work was evidently more 
or less a replica of St. Etienne, Caen. St. 
Alban’s followed immediately, but here 
native workmen were apparently used for 
the first time, and everything is rude, un- 
learned, and primitive: every hint of Lom- 
bard craftsmanship and Norman ingenuity 
is absent; old materials, Roman and British, 
are used over again, and nothing of Nor- 
man genius shows itself except in the huge 
proportions and the fine directness and sim- 
plicity of it all. Lincoln and Winchester 
were built at the same time, but little of the 
original work is left after the many re- 
buildings, except the transept of the latter, 
which, though ruder than the work in Nor- 
mandy, is rich and massive in its pier sec- 
tions and sets the fashion for the great 
abbeys of the succeeding century. The 
eleventh century portions of Ely show im- 


[ ror | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


proved craftsmanship and various interest- 
ing minor diversions from the Norman 
type, amongst them the inclination away 
from multiple piers toward the great cylin- 
drical shafts of stone later so popular at 
Durham, Tewkesbury, and Gloucester. It 
is at the last church, and also at Norwich, 
that we first find in England the two-story 
ambulatories around the choir, with a small 
group of radiating chapels. 

The number of great churches built in 
England between the Conquest and the end 
of the century was something prodigious, 
and their dimensions followed suit. The 
English abbeys of the eleventh and twelfth 
centuries were the largest structures in 
Christendom, and fine as they were when 
first built they never seemed adequate, but 
were extended, remodelled, and rebuilt for 
two centuries after a most extraordinary 
fashion. In their fabulous number and 
their unheard of dimensions they serve to 
give some idea of the part played in the 
Middle Ages by the monks who made them, 
and of the place religion held then in rela- 
tion to the people. To these monastic in- 
stitutions must be added great numbers of 
cathedrals and parish churches, and as a 

[ 102 | 


THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


result we are bound to realize that during 
this entire period not only was organized 
religion the chief power in the community 
and the State, but also that it must have 
been the intimate and personal interest of 
every member of society. As a matter of 
fact the parish was in England the social, 
and in many ways the political, unit. In the 
parish councils the lord of the manor was 
hardly more than one of his tenants. As 
the chancel belonged to the parson, so the 
nave was the property of the people, who 
were bound to keep it in repair and who 
were as jealous of their duties as they were 
of their privileges. As Bishop Hobhouse 
says, ‘““[he parish was the community of the 
township organized for Church purposes, 
and subject to Church discipline, with a 
constitution which recognized the rights of 
the whole body as an aggregate, and the 
right of every adult member, whether man 
or woman, to a voice in self government.” 
The roots of liberty and free democratic 
government, as these have come down to us 
in theory (though hardly in practice), are 
to be found far deeper in the old parish of 
the Medieval Church than in Parliament 
or folkthing or shire-mote. 
[ 103 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


From Apostolic days down to a few cen- 
turies ago the Mass was for all Christians 
a matter of holy obligation, and in every 
English parish church Mass was said daily, 
and several times on Sunday. The “ Chris- 
tian year” also, with its unending round 
of varied festivals and fasts and its com- 
memoration of equally varied saints (to 
some one of whom each Christian had his 
own personal devotion), interpenetrated the 
lives of all the people with an insistence 
and an individual appeal never equalled 
before or since. As for the seven Sacra- 
ments— Baptism, Confirmation, The Lord’s 
Supper, Matrimony, Penance, Holy Orders, 
and Extreme Unction — they accompanied 
everyone from the cradle to the grave, link- 
ing each life into the Christian fabric by 
indissoluble bonds and giving a spiritual 
significance and sacred character to every 
event in the life of every man. 

The monasteries were never more than a 
day’s journey apart in any direction, and 
were therefore an ever-present element in 
life. With the cathedrals they were the 
great centres of art and beauty in every 
form, more than adequately taking the place 
of the art galleries, libraries, opera houses, 


[ 104 ] 


hee PPOCH OF “TRANSITION 


theatres, and “ movies” of the present day, 
since in them art was alive, operative, and 
the possession of all. Each had some shrine 
where precious relics of saints or martyrs 
were venerated, and the whole country was 
threaded with pilgrim routes, crowded with 
devotees who were apparently as jolly as 
they were devout. ‘These religious houses 
were the greatest landlords in the realm and 
their tenants were envied by those who were 
under secular landlords, since they them- 
selves were more generously treated in every 
way. Education, mercy, medical science, 
charity, hospitality, and all the arts were 
centred in these religious houses, which also 
acted as trustees and guardians for orphans 
and minors. They were therefore not only 
necessarily large to accommodate the monks, 
lay brothers, scholars, guests, and servants, 
but often vast because of the enormous part 
they played in common life and the incred- 
ible throngs that came to them for worship 
and to claim their ministrations. 

It is hard for us to think back into such 
an alien spirit and time as this, and so un- 
derstand how, with a tenth of its present 
population, England could have supported 
so vast and varied a religious establishment, 


[ 105 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


used as we are to an age when religion is 
only a detail for many, and for most a neg- 
ligible factor. We are only too familiar 
with the community that could barely sup- 
port one parish church, boasting its half- 
dozen religious organizations, all together 
claiming the adherence of only a minority 
of the population, but in the Middle Ages 
religion was not only the most important 
and pervasive thing, it was a moral obli- 
gation on every man, woman, and child, 
and rejection, or even indifference, was un- 
thinkable. If we once grasp this fact we 
can understand how in the eleventh cen- 
tury the whole world should cover itself 
with its “ white robe of churches ” and why 
also their desecrated ruins should so often 
still manifest the vestiges of the greatest 
and most universal art the world has ever 
known. 

This work of William of Volpiano and 
Lanfranc, which we have been considering 
only too briefly, is of course very rightly 
called Norman; but I think it a mistake to 
place it in a category by itself and treat it 
as an intermediate style that came quite to 
an end to give place for Gothic as a new 
and independent creation. Instead of this 

[ 106 ] 


THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


sequence of quite individual styles there 
was, I believe, a swift, steady, and logical 
progress from William of Volpiano’s van- 
ished church at Dijon, through Jumieéges, 
Caen, and the English abbeys of the Nor- 
man Conquest, to St. Denis, Noyon, Paris, 
and Chartres, and so to the full flower of 
Amiens, Coutances, Rheims, York, West- 
minster. [he impulse was one, the goal 
always the same, but from time to time new 
influences were brought to bear on the 
process, and at one definite moment these 
were so numerous, so potent, and withal so 
novel that the course of events was not only 
accelerated but deflected from its original 
course, the result being the Gothic style. 
To appreciate these influences we must con- 
sider for a moment the twelfth century in 
its relation to its predecessor and its im- 
mediate successors. 

The eleventh century burst unheralded on 
a degenerate and hopeless Europe, but the 
twelfth was the onward and upward rush 
of that unparalleled energy already initi- 
ated and foreordained to a high destiny 
hitherto unequalled. The great principle 
of human association through manageable 
social units, that after the end of the great 


[ 107 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


dream of world empire had manifested 
itself through Benedictine monasticism and 
the feudal system, now extended itself even 
more widely and took shape in the parishes, 
the village communes, the guilds of traders 
and artisans, the great schools and colleges, 
and the lay orders of knighthood. Every- 
where men came together in brotherhoods, 
both secular and religious, and for a cen- 
tury or more Europe was organized on a 
socialistic basis which is the only possible 
model for similar movements, now or in the 
future, and which succeeded just in so far 
as it differed from our own contemporary 
socialistic schemes, vainly designed to effect 
the same ends. The twelfth century was 
more truly democratic than any society be- 
fore or since, if we consider democracy to 
consist, not in miscellaneous machinery and 
vicissitudinous panaceas, but in certain ends 
of right and justice. Today, abandoned as 
we are to the frantic invention of the en- 
gines and machinery of democracy, and to 
the devising of novel and startling nostrums 
for the curing of our manifold ills, we have 
wholly lost sight of democracy itself and 
have even forgotten in what it consists. 
Naturally, therefore, it is as hard for us 
[ 108 | 


Poe eVOCH OreLRANSITION 


to comprehend the vital democracy of the 
Middle Ages as it is to understand the part 
played by religion in the civilization of the 
same period. Both, however, are funda- 
mental, and I do not think it possible for 
anyone either to appreciate or to understand 
the art of the time without some recognition 
of them as basic facts. 

Perhaps one reason why the democracy 
of the twelfth century was so successful is 
that it never failed for leaders, since de- 
mocracy without high personal leadership 
is a dead thing that can end only in anarchy, 
or in that domination by the worst of its 
elements that finds its nemesis in the inevi- 
table reaction to despotism. The naming 
of all the great leaders of the time would 
run to the term of this lecture, and one can 
do no more than note a few in each cate- 
gory, as for example, amongst the kings, 
Lothair II, Charles the Fat, Henry Plan- 
tagenet, Richard Coeur de Lion, Philip 
Augustus, Roger of Sicily, with such vivid 
female personalities as Matilda of Tuscany, 
Eleanor of Guienne, Blanche of Castile. 
Amongst the great constructive leaders of 
thought who were brilliantly forging the 
wonder of Catholic philosophy were St. 
[ 109 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


Anselm, St. Bernard, Abelard, William of 
Champeaux, Peter Lombard, Hugh of St. 
Victor. In religion we find St. Robert of 
Molésme, St. Norbert, St. Thomas a Becket, 
Peter the Venerable, with, just at the end 
of the century, the great Pope, Innocent III. 

And the following was worthy of the 
leadership: not only was this, as I have said, 
the era of the guilds and communes, the 
great schools and universities, the military 
orders of knighthood, it was also the age 
of increasing art in every category: of 
music, through the trouvéres and trouba- 
dours, and the chansons de gestes,; of poetry, 
through the forming in final shape of the 
legends of Arthur and of the Holy Grail; 
of architecture, through the transforming 
of Norman into Gothic. If ever the élan 
vital rose to inordinate heights of untram- 
melled creation, it was then; and this vivid 
vitality seemed to overflow itself in every 
category of mental and physical and spirit- 
ual activity. The development of the sys- 
tem of sacramental or Catholic philosophy 
is a sufficient exemplar of the first, the 
career of the Norman adventurers of the 
second, while the Cistercian reformation is 
typical of the third. It is only now, in these 

[ 110 ] 





X. CaTHEDRAL, Parma DE MALuorca 





| 


mites EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


last days, while our own chosen system of 
evolutionary philosophy is falling in ruins 
around us, that we are beginning to think 
back beyond Herbert Spencer, beyond 
Kant, beyond Descartes, beyond St. Thomas 
Aquinas himself, to that very wonderful 
system that finds perhaps its best exposition 
in Hugh of St. Victor, and to discover there, 
in the midst of the twelfth century, a body of 
illuminating philosophy that is to the Chris- 
tian world what Plato was to paganism. 
As for the bodily activity of inordinate 
adventure, there is nothing more stimulat- 
ing than the story of the Hautevilles, the 
eight sons of a poor gentleman of Nor- 
mandy, five of whom proved themselves 
conquerors of the first degree, winning in 
Sicily and southern Italy estates for them- 
selves as well as thrones, now and again, for 
their descendants. Of course all their com- 
peers were doing the same sort of thing; — 
conquering England, the Holy Land, even 
gaining the throne of the Eastern Empire; 
but the hardy Hautevilles are the best ex- 
ponent of Norman force, since they show 
how, in a single family, the ardour of ac- 
tion is not confined to one alone but extends 
itself through all. 
LETs| 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


Of the Cistercian reformation I must 
speak more at length, since it was the chief 
agent in effecting the change from the Nor- 
man to the Gothic principle in architecture. 
Monasticism, of the type established it 
would seem, once for all, by St. Benedict 
of Nursia in the sixth century, is an essen- 
tial element in Christian civilization, re- 
curring ever and again when the things 
against which it contends have achieved 
supremacy and brought society to the point 
of ruin. In the sixth, the eleventh, and the 
sixteenth centuries it had its most brilliant 
manifestations, and already it is preparing 
again for its identical office of social regen- 
eration. It is, however, human in its con- 
stitution, and subject to the general law of 
degeneration, therefore it is constantly laps- 
ing from its ideals, its standards, and its 
prescribed modes of action. If its work 
is not accomplished before this inevitable 
retrogression sets in, then another order 
comes into existence to continue the labour 
under a new impulse of righteousness. The 
work of the Middle Ages was not accom- 
plished before the Order of Cluny, that had 
made the Normans the most potent forces 
in Europe, surrendered to the gravitational 


henra- 


THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


peril of the world, and became rich, self- 
indulgent, morally lax. By the end of the 
eleventh century the Benedictines of Cluny 
had made the art they had re-created a 
thing of luxury, splendour, and inordinate 
expense. Cathedrals, abbeys, and churches 
were vast, massive, elaborate in design, opu- 
lent in sculpture and colour and gold. The 
vestments for the sacred offices, the altar 
vessels and ornaments, the Mass books and 
shrines and reliquaries were of a Byzantine 
luxury in their wealth of gold and silver 
and precious stones. Art took the place of 
ethic; ease and luxury and license came in 
the stead of self-denial, holy poverty, and 
missionary zeal. Nevertheless the work 
was only half done; therefore St. Robert 
of Molesme was moved to a reform that 
should be a return to Apostolic righteous- 
ness and zeal, the Order of Citeaux being 
the result. It was a glorious return to the 
Benedictinism of St. Benedict himself, and 
at once old men and young flocked to the 
Cistercian monasteries in such numbers that 
fathers and mothers and wives tried to hide 
or place under restraint the boys and men of 
their families in order that they might not 
yield to the overwhelming call of the clois- 


ira?) 


THE SUBSTANCE, OF GOTT 


ter. Within a few years of the founding, 
St. Bernard became a monk of the new 
order, and then the situation became worse, 
for now men were neither to hold nor to 
bind, and secular society was decimated. 
The result was not, however, what might 
have been feared by the eugenists of the 
time (if there were any), for the imposi- 
tion of the law of celibacy on tens of thou- 
sands of the best of both sexes could not 
depress the standard, and character waxed 
even finer and more vigorous for several 
generations. 

The effect on architecture was immedi- 
ate and fundamental: hitherto, with all its 
magnificence it had been structurally static, 
a style of inertia. In the Roman basilica 
the principle of dead loads held practically 
throughout, for the thrust of the narrow 
aisle arches was negligible, that of the tri- 
umphal arch taken up by the lateral walls 
of the transept, that of the dome of the apse 
by its own thick walls. The domical church 
of the East was indeed active in every part, 
but with little concentration of thrusts, and 
the varied and incessant push was met by 
counteracting masses of inert masonry and 
walls of enormous thickness. ‘The same 


[114 ] 


THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


principles held in Normandy and England: 
as arches widened in span the walls grew 
thicker and more massive, the abutments 
more ponderous. With the adoption of 
cross vaulting of masonry the resulting con- 
centration of weight and thrusts was ignored 
and the intervening wall areas were thick- 
ened equally with the local abutments. 
Five-foot walls became almost a minimum, 
and the thickness was sometimes increased 
up to eight or ten feet. Of course the re- 
sult was the necessity of providing huge 
masses of masonry, expensive in themselves 
and very tempting to carvers and decorators. 
It cannot be denied that these vast and 
massive structures have a power and dig- 
nity all their own, — as, for example, Peter- 
borough, Ely, Durham, —and they were 
so well liked that in England they gener- 
ally resisted the advent of the new Gothic 
fashion of construction, while accepting its 
outward forms, and for this reason English 
Gothic achieved little of the structural logic 
and economy of France. On the whole, 
however, the magnificent Norman style was 
intolerable to the Cistercian puritans, and 
at their instigation the master builders of 
the time strove to find a solution that, while 


[115 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTEAG 


sacrificing nothing of beauty, should yet 
reduce the initial cost. The success of this 
effort was triumphant, but it was due to 
the entrance into the field of a new racial 
element different alike from the Italianized 
Lombards of the south and the Christian- 
ized Vikings of Normandy. This new ele- 
ment was that of the Franks of the Ile de 
France, who, under the spur of the Cister- 
cians, brought to bear on the structural 
problem the acute intellect, the creative in- 
genuity, and the unfailing logic that were 
their everlasting contribution to the great 
and glorious unity we know as the French 
people. Under their hands architecture 
was made over, for their quick wit and 
ready ingenuity soon showed them that by 
concentrating loads, thrusts, and abutments 
they could reduce the bulk of their masonry 
by half, and furthermore, that there were 
certain physical laws that might be discov- 
ered by experiment, if not on a priori 
grounds, and that these laws might be used 
to determine lines of energy, weights of 
resistance, and factors of safety. In a word 
they brought pure science to bear on the 
question, not as master but as servant, in 
which respect they differed radically from 


[ 116 | 


THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


the devotee of science of today. In time 
the whole thing turned into a game, and 
the master builder became obsessed by his 
science, to the peril of his art as well as of 
his buildings themselves, but for an hun- 
dred and fifty years the just balance was 
maintained before Beauvais. closed the 
chapter in calamity. 

The ribbed and pointed vault had already 
been worked out, and so had the two forms 
of sexpartite vaulting, in the abbeys of 
Caen. The next step was the adoption of 
the oblong vault area. In the Abbaye des 
Dames the vault, though comparatively late, 
is undeniably a survival of the earliest form 
of high vault, for it is simply a great inter- 
secting vault of equal sides, the transverse 
crown being reinforced and supported by 
an arch with its spandrels filled in by a thin 
wall of stone — manifestly an evidence of 
doubt on the part of the builders as to the 
stability of so large a quadripartite vault 
as is necessary to span a nave always twice 
the width of the aisle. Incidentally it is 
also a first step to the oblong area. ‘The 
vault of the Abbaye aux Hommes is a 
clumsy approach to the true sexpartite 
vault, for here the masonry springs back 


eae. 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


on either side from the intermediate wall 
to meet the main curves of the square 
vault, so forming exterior wall surfaces 
into which an arched window would ac- 
commodate itself without offence. Of 
course, as soon as the oblong areas which 
naturally followed from the perfected sex- 
partite form were generally adopted, the 
alternating system was given up, and the 
regular order of Gothic columniation de- 
termined for all time. Simultaneously the 
device of stilting was introduced, whereby 
sharply pointed arches were avoided and 
the full thrust of the vault brought to bear 
along a single vertical line above the vault 
shafts — a thing as beautiful as it was me- 
chanically perfect, for it resulted in that 
warping of the vault surfaces which is one 
of the most subtle charms of French Gothic 
architecture. 

The problem of receiving these concen- 
trated thrusts had been partially solved in 
Normandy: the old Roman device of huge 
masses of masonry, or rather transverse 
walls, adopted at Sant’ Ambrogio, had been 
abandoned, and in his Abbaye aux Hommes 
Lanfranc had substituted the half of a barrel 
vault running the length of the aisle and 

[ 118 ] 


DHE EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


abutting against the nave wall. This was 
effective but illogical, for only a small part 
of the buttressing arch received any thrust 
whatever. Almost immediately, therefore, 
as in the Abbaye des Dames, the intervening 
areas were cut away and only the arch at 
each pier remained. ‘This of course was a 
true flying buttress, but it was still concealed 
below the aisle roof, hence the clerestory 
was restricted in height to the wall area 
of the vault alone. At Noyon, about the 
middle of the century, and apparently for 
the first time, the abutting arch emerged 
into the open air and the flying buttress with 
all its possibilities had come into its own. 
We have now, you will perceive, nearly 
all the elements of the Gothic organism: the 
cruciform plan with wide transepts and 
deep choir, the vertical order of arcade, 
triforium and clerestory, pointed arches, 
ribbed and stilted vaults with oblong com- 
partments, concentrated loads and thrusts, 
direct abutments, with the flying buttress 
in posse, and the intervening walls reduced 
by half in thickness; articulation expressed 
by compound piers and arches, with vault 
shafts well grounded from vault to floor, 
lofty proportions, complex compositions of 


[ 119 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GO Ting 


light and shade. All this has worked itself 
out in the interior of the church; outwardly 
little change is apparent, for Gothic growth 
was exclusively from within outward, as it 
was essentially a logical and an organic 
growth. We have, it is true, even at Jumi- 
eges, the great west towers, with the other 
over the crossing always favoured in Nor- 
mandy and therefore in England even to the 
end of the Middle Ages, but apart from 
such large and general forms the exterior, 
even of almost fully developed Gothic struc- 
tures, still remains, to all intents and pur- 
poses, that of a Norman church. 

In the meantime the great architectural 
idea of the chevet, or polygonal apse with 
its single or double encircling aisle and 
radiating chapels, forming as it does the 
great structural and artistic glory of the 
style, and the point where, intellectually, 
all the vivid logic of the French master 
builders shows itself at its highest per- 
fection, had been slowly evolving after 
a curiously entertaining fashion. When 
the domical church of Constantinople, 
Ravenna, and Aix-la-Chapelle was finally 
superseded by the western and more ancient 
basilican plan, it was not wholly abandoned, 

[ 120 ] 


thit EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


for its possibilities were too great. First 
of all, the final form of a domed polygon 
surrounded by a vaulted aisle with shallow 
projecting bays or apses, was cut in halves 
and added to the cross-shaped basilica; then 
it was subjected to the process of concen- 
tration, articulation, and scientific refine- 
ment that was taking place in the remainder 
of the fabric, and we obtain the astonishing 
sequence: a Roman calidarium, Bosrah, 
Ravenna, Aix-la-Chapelle, St. Martin at 
Tours, St. Germer de Fly, St. Denis, Char- 
tres, Amiens, and Le Mans. A very inter- 
esting evidence of the plausibility of this 
theory, not, I think, heretofore noted, is the 
apse of the abbey church at Essen, dated 
about 1040, which is simply three sides of 
Charlemagne’s chapel at Aix applied to the 
end of a Romanesque basilican church. We 
still lack, of course, the Gothic spirit as it 
showed itself esthetically, and without this, 
no matter how highly developed may be our 
Gothic structural form, we have not the 
whole of Gothic, for this is a spirit as well 
as an organic system of building. ‘The ef- 
fort has been made—as I believe, both 
unwisely and unsuccessfully —to confine 
the word “Gothic” exclusively to that 


[ 121 | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


work which is perfect in its structural sys- 
tem and its organic form, according to the 
highest point reached at any time in these 
directions. This mechanistic and even 
pedantic method of criticism is of the nine- 
teenth century type of analytical and mate- 
rialistic mentality, and I doubt if it can 
maintain itself much longer. Gothic con- 
struction is indeed the most highly articu- 
lated, the most vividly intelligent, and the 
most scientifically exact ever devised by 
man, but it is only a part of Gothic archi- 
tecture, which is as well the expression of 
an entirely new social and devotional spirit, 
engendered by a peculiar, beneficent, and 
dynamic energy in the world of the west, 
and expressed through new forms of beauty 
that have no historic prototypes. The 
greatest Gothic monuments are such as 
Chartres and Amiens and Rheims, but all 
other structures, whether civil or secular, 
produced between 1150 and 1400 under the 
influence of Medieval culture, by the races 
of the north, are equally Gothic, whether 
the full structural system is present in all 
its integrity, or only indifferently, or even 
not at all. 

The sequence of development as recorded 

Cer 














SEVILLE CATHEDRAL 


I 


Xx 





THE EPOCH OF TRANSITION 


in existing buildings is approximately this: 
Bury, St. Leu d’Esserent, St. Germer de 
Fly, St. Denis, after which Gothic is fully, 
firmly, and finally developed. The space 
of time involved is from 1125 to 1140, — 
surely the most astonishing fifteen years in 
architectural history. In the nave of Bury, 
begun in 1125, we find the pointed arch 
used consistently, with ribbed, stilted, and 
oblong vaults, all handled clumsily and with 
hesitation, but with undoubted conviction. 
St. Germer de Fly, begun five years later, 
is almost as amazing a portent as was Jumi- 
éges for its own time, for it was appar- 
ently without a prototype, yet here we find 
all the elements of Bury handled with per- 
fect assurance, and as well a complete ar- 
ticulation of shafting, a chevet very well 
worked out, the second story gallery re- 
duced to the limits of a true triforium, and 
all the loftiness of line and grace of propor- 
tions that we associate with perfected 
Gothic. Its flying buttresses are still con- 
cealed below the triforium roof, therefore 
the clerestory is largely blank wall with 
small pointed windows confined between 
the spring and the crest of the vaults. Out- 
wardly the church is still sturdily Norman. 
[ 123 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


Five years later the great Abbot Suger 
built his fine new Abbey of St. Denis, leav- 
ing us, fortunately, a brilliant and enthusi- 
astic account of his aims and his methods. 
The church was consecrated in 1140; it 
was immediately followed by Sens, Noyon, 
Paris, and Laon, and stands, therefore, as 
marking the point when the vital new tend- 
ency reached its fulfilment and Medizval- 
ism achieved its perfect form of expression. 
Of the original work of Suger only the west 
front and the ambulatories of the chevet 
remain, for a century later all the rest of 
the church was rebuilt in the fully devel- 
oped Gothic manner, forming one of the 
great examples of the perfected style. From 
what remains, however, and from the ad- 
mirable old abbot’s proud narrative, it is 
evident that at last all sense of hesitation 
and uncertainty had disappeared; Bury and 
St. Germer de Fly took their places as the 
last of the Norman mode in which the spirit 
of the new Gothic was working hiddenly; 
St. Denis itself crossed the dividing line and 
became the first of the great sequence of the 
monuments of Catholic Christianity that 
ended only with the advent of the new 
paganism. 

[ 124 ] 


PiesPOCH (OF TRANSITION 


It was not that any new devices were in- 
troduced, for there were none to be dis- 
covered; it was rather that the power that 
was working for self-expression at last ac- 
quired its adequate master craftsmen who 
worked now with confidence and convic- 
tion, with a high intelligence irradiated by 
a kind of divine inspiration, refining and 
perfecting, articulating and co-ordinating 
all that a century of devoted and progres- 
sive effort had brought to their hands. 
Now first the Gothic spirit bores itself 
through from within, outward, the last of 
the old static Norman is consumed away, 
and the great progress begins that was to 
find its apotheosis, just an hundred years 
later, in the Cathedral of Our Lady of 
Rheims, destined to stand in all its unap- 
proachable majesty century after century, 
while the spirit that had created it died 
away amongst men and the new power in 
the world worked its will amongst all na- 
tions and all peoples; destined at last to be 
given into the hands of those who best had 
learned the lesson of this new power and 
applied its methods, who blasted it with 
their own consummate engines of destruc- 
tion and left it shattered, scorched, and 


[ 125 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


desecrated, but with its eternal fabric still 
intact. Even so, under the same assaults, 
the everlasting power that brought it into 
being still stands, shattered, scorched, and 
desecrated, but, like Rheims, ultimately in- 
destructible, and destined again to redemp- 
tion and regeneration. 


[ 126 ] 


LECTURE V 
THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


I HAVE tried in the last two lectures to 
show how, first in Lombardy, then in Nor- 
mandy, and all within the limits of a cen- 
tury, the essential structural elements of a 
potential Gothic were being invented or re- 
discovered, until at last, under Lanfranc, 
the material was assembled and made ready 
for that finger-touch of creative vitality that 
was to transform a casual assembling into 
coherency, and transfigure it with a new 
spirit of unexampled power and of beauty 
unapproachable. In the same way, as I 
have endeavoured to make clear, an identi- 
cal process was being followed in civil and 
ecclesiastical society. Out of equal dark- 
ness came equal light, and this new day 
made possible the artistic transformation 
that was now to take place. Feudalism had 
created a new society made up of human 
units linked by the human bonds of per- 
‘sonal attachment and reciprocal duties and 
Fre | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTH?¢G 


privileges. Out of this admirable social 
scheme came an added impulse toward the 
ideals of service, obedience, loyalty, honour, 
chivalry. Monasticism had grown from a 
protest into a world-wide agency of service, 
rebuilding the ruined fabric of education 
and art, creating anew a vast but always 
human agency of charity, mercy, and hos- 
pitality. The guild system, working on 
from self-protecting alliances of traders, 
had extended itself to every existing form 
of industry and commerce, always, as in 
other domains, of human and manageable 
scale, until the workman held a position of 
self-respect and of independence, with an 
assurance of just and certain compensation, 
such as he had never held before and has 
failed to achieve since. In the south, where 
the lingering tradition of a dead imperial- 
ism prevented the normal development of 
feudalism, the crescent spirit of independ- 
ence and co-operation made itself visible 
through the free communes or city-states, 
where again the basis of association was 
human in its scale in place of the vast 
material aggregate of force and military 
power of the preceding epoch, and of the 
vague abstractions of political dogmatism, 
[ 128 ] 


THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


philosophical theory, and empty shibbo- 
leths of that which was to follow. 

The ardent and restless spirit of the north 
had opened up new lines of pilgrimage and 
adventure through Europe, across the Med- 
iterranean, into the mysterious fastnesses of 
Africa, Arabia, Syria, the Levant, even into 
the frozen north of the heathen tribes, and 
the wonder of a doubly mysterious Asia. 
The crusades had stirred the spirit of Nor- 
mandy, Flanders, France, the Rhineland, 
England, and opened up new possibilities 
of adventure, conquest, treasure, commer- 
cial gain, while the paynim principalities 
in the south and the decadent empires of 
the East were a living incentive to the ex- 
panding vigour and the overriding ambi- 
tion of the uncontrollable races of the north. 

With the humanizing of society came an 
identical humanizing of religion and of 
philosophy. During the patristic days the 
Church had been so busy in determining 
in exact form the verbal symbols of essen- 
tial dogma, and in beating down one plau- 
sible heresy after another, that the natural 
process of devotional development had been 
held back, and the latent humanism in the 
original deposit of the Faith came but 

[ 129 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOD 


slowly into view and operation. For five 
centuries, however, the humanizing process 
had been going on, and by the opening of 
the thirteenth century the Church had 
adapted its system of worship to the eternal 
and unchangeable demands of the human 
soul, until it met these at every point. I 
do not mean to say that anything novel in 
doctrine was added; it was rather that new 
spiritual possibilities were revealing them- 
selves through dogmas and practices exist- 
ing from the beginning, and that new forms 
of devotion grew up to intensify the appeal 
of doctrines that dated from the time of the 
Apostles themselves. For example, the in- 
vocation of the saints and prayers for the 
dead are recorded even in the catacombs 
and: were a part of original Christianity; 
now, however, the new impulse of human 
and personal relationship took hold of the 
ancient doctrines and established a sense of 
intimate kinship between the individual on 
the one hand and the hierarchy of angels 
and archangels, the saints and martyrs, the 
dead of every family, on the other. ‘This 
new spiritual intimacy served to bring the 
divine and the unseen down closer to earth, 
while lifting man and his common life into 


[ 130 ] 


THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


closer communion with the whole company 
of heaven. In the same way the Mass had 
been, certainly since the post-Apostolic age, 
both Communion and Sacrifice; now, how- 
ever, the latter quality was increasingly em- 
phasized and the inevitable corollary of the 
sacramental presence of Christ in the con- 
secrated species resulted, in the time of 
Charlemagne, in the clear enunciation of 
the doctrine of Transubstantiation, though 
the final definition was not to be determined 
for many centuries. 

An identical process was going on in 
philosophy, whereby the aloof and abstruse 
orientalism of the Eastern and Alexandrian 
schools, and the massive yet precise intel- 
lectualism of St. Augustine, were being 
fused in a comprehensive sacramentalism 
that was at the same time definitive, since 
it was an intellectual approximation to an 
intelligible exposition of the fundamental 
law of all life, and of unusual appeal 
through its perfect adaptation to the needs 
and desires and aspirations of the human 
soul. This singularly human yet equally 
exalted philosophy seems to me to find its 
full flower in Hugh of St. Victor, with 
-St. Anselm and St. Bernard as particular 


[ 131 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


exponents of certain of its more limited 
aspects. 

The dominating influence, then, which 
determines and emphasizes Medievalism, 
is a very real humanism that is in fact the 
antithesis of that fictitious humanism of the 
Renaissance which has usurped the name. 
It moulds and transmits and fixes in definite 
form every thought and action of the time, 
and is as fundamental in controlling artistic 
development as in establishing the nature 
of the religion, the philosophy, the social 
system of the Middle Ages. While it re- 
sulted in the most perfectly balanced 
scheme of life that is of record, it was by 
its very nature peculiarly susceptible of 
abuse. As the inevitable tendency of mys- 
ticism is ever further and further away 
from the earth into the impalpable ether, 
until Hugh of St. Victor is merged into 
St. Bonaventure and so into Hildegarde of 
Bingen and Fritz Thauler: as the inevitable 
tendency of pure intellectualism is from St. 
Thomas Aquinas ever lower and lower 
through Calvin and Herbert Spencer to the 
impossible nadir of Haeckel, so the tend- 
ency of humanism is toward that disas- 
trous point when all spiritual things are 

[ 132 ] 


THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


reduced to the level and scale of man him- 
self and there is no longer any distinguish- 
ing between the two. Then comes anthro- 
pomorphism, the debasing of worship to 
the level of a series of charms and formula, 
the purchase and sale of sacraments, indul- 
gences, dispensations; the invention of crude 
and vulgar devotions, with loss, in the end, 
of spiritual consciousness and even of the 
very sense of right and wrong. 

As a matter of fact, much of all this re- 
vealed itself progressively through the lat- 
ter Middle Ages, and what had been its 
glory became its shame. As, however, you 
cannot judge monasticism after the nine- 
teenth century fashion, from its incidents 
and episodes, and final estate of degrada- 
tion, but rather by its great epochs when it 
was in the full flower of its splendour and 
beneficence, so you cannot judge the Middle 
Ages from their decadence. What they 
became after 1305 when the secular power 
regained control of religion, does not con- 
cern us here. The architecture we are con- 
sidering was the exponent of the culture 
and civilization of Medizvalism while it 
was still young and vigorous, or in its ma- 
_jestic maturity. This period lasts, roughly, 
[ 133 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


from the year 1000 to 1300, a space of three 
centuries, one half of which is the era of 
youth and endeavour, one half of accom- 
plishment and an only too brief supremacy 
before the inevitable decline. 

I may confess now what you already will 
have discovered, viz.: that I have under- 
taken an impossible task in endeavouring 
to concentrate into six hours not only the 
art of six centuries but as well something 
of the spirit and the power that lay behind 
it. JI can now hardly more than refer in 
the most superficial way to the pregnant 
events of this amazing time, leaving those 
of you who are interested, perhaps, to find 
in Henry Osborne Taylor’s “ The Medie- 
val Mind,” Dr. Walsh’s “ The Thirteenth 
Greatest of Centuries,” and Henry Adams’s 
‘““Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres,” the 
secret revealed, as in no other books I know, 
of the dynamic force that took shape in a 
system of life and thought the perfect ex- 
pression of which is the art, and especially 
the architecture, of the central century of 
the Middle Ages. 

Two hundred years of varied monastic 
influence toward righteousness had at last 
resulted in a redemption of the Papacy that 


[ 134 ] 


2 rsx $8h5? 





ES CATHEDRAL 


BourG 


Il. 


X 





THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


made it, through the great pontiff, Inno- 
cent III, the controlling power in Europe, 
and Innocent himself a kind of spiritual 
Lord of the World. All kings were ulti- 
mately subject to him, even Philip Augus- 
tus of France, whose domestic irregularities 
wrought an issue between them that was 
salved only by royal surrender. As Inno- 
cent was followed by such worthy succes- 
sors as Gregory IX and Boniface VIII, 
so Philip of France was followed by 
Louis VIII and St. Louis, the last of whom 
has well been called “the ideal of a loyal 
knight and a Christian king.” And there 
were great kings in all the world: Frederick 
Barbarossa, Frederic II, Edward I, Robert 
Bruce, Rudolph of Hapsburg, Ferdinand 
III, Alphonso the Wise. Learning and edu- 
cation ascended by leaps and bounds; the 
universities rapidly made themselves a 
greater force than the monasteries that had 
created them, and philosophy, through Al- 
bertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, 
Raymond Lully, Alexander Hales, and, 
greatest of all, perhaps the most supreme 
intellect of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas, 
reached a height of almost inconceivable 
achievement. Arts that had struggled 
erssu 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


toward the light during the preceding cen- 
tury reached their culmination, and arts 
long forgotten were born again. ‘The union 
of music and poetry at the hands of the 
meistersingers and minnesingers and of 
those of the creators of the great Latin 
hymns (the latter a new art altogether) 
lifted both arts to new and exalted levels, 
while pure music became perfected in the 
Gregorian mode. In Siena and Florence 
painting was reborn in Duccio, Cimabue, 
and Giotto, while sculpture, restored in 
France a century before the Pisani in Italy, 
achieved a fruition that placed it on the 
same plane as that held by the sculpture of 
Hellas. So this incredible century pro- 
ceeds, and at the end all is gathered to- 
gether in Dante, the eternal synthesis of 
Medievalism. 

Great as was the thirteenth century in 
constructive statesmanship, in the fixing of 
the principles and the laws of civil liberty, 
in philosophy, and in the development of 
all the arts (whether the old arts of paint- 
ing and sculpture and poetry or the new 
of stained glass, hymnology, illumination), 
its achievement in architecture was in some 
ways the most notable, perhaps because 


[ 136 | 


THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


what happened there epitomizes all that 
was done elsewhere, and the nature of what 
was accomplished is precisely that which 
informed the whole body of Medieval 
achievement. 

We have seen how nearly all the struc- 
tural elements of Gothic already had been 
brought into being; what remained was the 
Gothicizing of it all, the giving it essen- 
tial Gothic quality. This may, I think, 
be divided under three heads, Cohesion, 
Economy, and Character. The first means 
knitting everything together synthetically, 
giving it a certain dynamic power to grow 
from within outward in accordance with 
clear laws and under one impulse, and 
finally making structure itself, not only effi- 
cient as such, but beautiful in itself, the 
central fact and force in the style, all or- 
nament of every kind being something 
added, but growing inevitably from it. 
Economy means the discovery of physical 
forces, using them in such a way that they 
work either together or in intelligent and 
effective opposition, so making possible the 
reduction of columns, walls, arches, but- 
tresses, vaults, to a logical minimum, but 
always with regard to that optical mini- 

aise all 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


mum which prevented a reduction in bulk 
below a certain point, even if a further 
diminution would be structurally safe, since 
the mind must be satisfied, through the eye, 
and the physical test could not be consid- 
ered as final. Character is the hardest thing 
to define, but in a way the most significant. 
It is the quality that makes a thing Gothic 
whether its structural system is of the per- 
fectly developed type or not. It is what 
the glass of Chartres, the sculpture of 
Amiens, the pictures of Giotto, the Hora 
Novissima, the High History of the Holy 
Grail, all possess in common with the great 
cathedrals, and in so full a degree that they 
may all be called Gothic, or Medieval, or 
if you like Catholic. Singly and together 
they are the creation and the expression of 
the one epoch when Catholicism interpene- 
trated all life to such an extent that no 
single portion of society except the Jews, 
the Mohammedans, and the as yet uncon- 
verted tribes of Prussia, were outside its 
scope or beyond its influence and control. 
Character means for us difference in qual- 
ity, and this is both material and spiritual. 
Saint Georges de Boscherville has, for ex- 
ample, almost as many Gothic elements in 
[ 138 ] 


THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


its construction as the Cathedral of Sens, 
but the one is essentially Norman in char- 
acter, the other just as essentially Gothic. 
The character of the mouldings in Cérisy 
is of one type, that of Noyon absolutely dif- 
ferent, and the same is true of the scheme, 
the material, and the detail of design. The 
ornament of the later Norman and Roman- 
esque is rich and elaborate beyond Gothic 
comparison, until the fifteenth century, but 
it differs as completely from that of Char- 
tres or Amiens or Lincoln as it does, on the 
other hand, from that of Greece. The plac- 
ing of ornament, also, is wholly different, 
and a new theory of composition grows out 
of a new energy. 

What is it that determined all this, and 
in thirty years gave to architecture a new 
character that it retained for nearly three 
centuries? It is, I think, that sudden 
achievement, by certain peoples, of their 
majority. Into the golden chalice of life 
are poured, from a score of flagons, the 
streams of living water; little by little the 
chalice brims higher and higher, and at last 
— at one moment it is full but continent, at 
the next it overflows. Blood of the North, 
religious fervour and devotion, a new and 


[ 139 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE (OF GOT 


fine economic system, a stimulating philos- 
ophy, liberal education, personal freedom, 
sense of honour, chivalry, service, all as- 
semble to the filling of the cup, and between 
1150 and 1175 it brims to the full, runs 
over, and a new stylistic epoch in architec- 
ture is accomplished. 

Behind and through it all is the new 
humanism. Our Lady and the saints are 
friends and defenders, and their service is 
the pleasure and the duty of chivalry. The 
world is seen to be very beautiful, with its 
flowers and its birds and kind little beasts 
of the woods. Personal allegiance and 
friendship, and an almost mystical rever- 
ence for women bind all kinds and classes 
with close bonds. Men are free, and as 
freemen, brave and laborious: the guilds 
make all work honourable and give each 
man his chance of self-expression and emu- 
lation. All environment is beautiful, all 
costumes full of life and colour, men are 
imbued with the beauty and the splendour 
of religious and secular ceremonial, ugly 
things disappear and more and more lovely 
things take their place. Unconsciously men 
have come to like good things and to make 
only good things, and the race —not the 


[ 140 ] 


THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


patron, the amateur, or the isolated artist, 
— expresses its own and intimate self. 

In the last lecture | came with you down 
to that final quarter of the twelfth century 
where at St. Denis and Sens, Gothic archi- 
tecture had shown itself in all its potential 
force: from them we go straight to Notre 
Dame in Paris; for here, working from east 
to west, we can see the process of complete 
development. 

The great church was begun in 1163, only 
twenty years after St. Denis, the choir of 
course coming first, and the work gradu- 
ally extending itself westward until the 
facade with its towers was finished in its 
present state in 1235. The plan is fine, 
clear, and well articulated, but the vertical 
order is and always was defective. It fol- 
lows the Norman Abbaye aux Hommes and 
has a lofty vaulted gallery in place of the 
low triforium of the Abbaye des Dames, 
and is in this sense inferior to the somewhat 
earlier Sens where the triforium is of very 
great beauty. In Notre Dame, again, cylin- 
drical columns are used for the nave arcade | 
throughout, the vaulting shafts resting on 
their caps. I have never understood why 
this device—a distinct retrogression in 


poe oe 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


point of articulation — should be so much 
admired by critics. At Sens this stopping 
off the vault shafts occurs only on the in- 
termediate columns, which is admirable, 
since there the scheme is alternating and 
the vault sexpartite, the piers carrying the 
transverse ribs, and therefore the major part 
of the weight, perfectly expressing their 
function by being divided into five colo- 
nettes, each of which takes a member of 
the group of vault ribs, grounding them all 
solidly at the pavement. The perfect sys- 
tem is of course that at Chartres, and almost 
invariable thereafter, i.e. a smaller circular 
shaft with four attached colonettes, one 
reaching from floor to vault and carrying 
the transverse rib, one performing the same 
function in the aisle, with those on either 
side taking the inner ring of the moulded 
arches of the arcade. The colonettes that 
take the diagonal ribs of the high vault 
are either stopped on the top of the ar- 
cade cap, or better still at the base course 
of the triforium, while the longitudinal 
ribs find their support at the clerestory 
level. | 

The nave must have been finished about 
1196, and in 1210 the west front was begun 


[ 142 ] 


THE MEDIZAVAL SYNTHESIS 


and completed in fifteen years. About 1230 
there was a serious conflagration, and at 
that time the novel but unbeautiful round 
windows above the triforium in each bay 
were cut out to allow the lengthening of the 
clerestory windows, and at the same time 
the original and fine scheme of double but- 
tressing in the chevet was abandoned for 
the irrational and inorganic flying buttresses 
leaping both aisles, and grieving the logician 
as much as they excite the admiration of the 
tourist. ‘These same preposterous buttresses 
are one of the first evidences of the inevi- 
table danger that lurked in the scientific 
proficiency of the French, who were always 
trying for some new structural wonder and 
only desisted when Beauvais, which they 
had pushed even beyond the limits of rea- 
son, collapsed in ruin, and, after an humilli- 
ating bolstering up by additional supports, 
remained a vast fragment as the monument 
to overriding ambition. Impossible as they 
are, these buttresses, or rather these but- 
tress pinnacles, are examples of the most 
exquisite detail to be found in the style, and 
here again we find a premonition of the 
fate in store when the integrity of construc- 
tion was lost and Gothic became the riot 


[ 143 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


of marvellous decoration that is called 
Flamboyant. 

Between 1245 and 1250 the nave chapels 
between the buttresses were constructed — 
another serious error in judgment — and 
the transepts were pushed outward a bay, 
while at the very end of the century the 
apsidal chapels were built, the ambulatory 
originally having no chapels whatever. 
Notre Dame stands as a living record, 
therefore, of all stages of Gothic during its 
first period, but no portion can match the 
west front which marks the culmination of 
the style. It is perhaps the noblest archi- 
tectural conception of man, classical in its 
simplicity, its matchless proportions, the 
brilliancy of its design, the perfect scale of 
its detail, the subtle rhythm of its delicate 
variations. 

Amongst the other great cathedrals es- 
sentially of the twelfth century we find 
Noyon, Laon, Senlis, Poitiers, Bourges, and 
Chartres. It is impossible to describe them 
now, for each deserves a lecture by itself. 
Infinite in their variety, they are all under 
the same inspiration. Laon has its perfectly 
proportioned plan and its great scheme of 
seven clustering spires; Soissons has its 


[ 144 ] 


THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


wonderful south transept which Porter 
calls “one of the most ethereal of all 
twelfth century designs and the highest ex- 
pression of that fairy-like, Saracenic phase 
of Gothic art that had first come into being 
at Noyon.”’ As for Bourges, it is unique, 
and to me the finest Gothic interior in the 
world, with its vast, transeptless nave, its 
five aisles, and its pyramidal system of arch- 
ing that lifts the nave arcade half as high 
again in proportion as in any other church, 
its glimmering forest of shafts vanishing 
above in luminous shadow. Chartres of 
course remains in the end the noblest work 
of Gothic art, even though almost every 
other church excels it in some single point. 
In spite of the bewigged canons of the 
eighteenth century who desecrated its choir 
with cheap imitation marbles and its sanc- 
tuary with a riotous high-altar that looks 
like a Broadway burlesque, and _ then 
smashed some of the matchless windows in 
order that the world might see the results 
of their stupendous crime — in spite of this 
Chartres remains less wrecked within by 
bigotry, revolution, the vulgarity of the 
eighteenth and the restorations of the nine- 
teenth century, than any other of the great 


[145 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


cathedrals, and it still retains the vast ma- 
jority of its original glass, which is to this 
art what the west front of Notre Dame is 
to architecture — its final, perfect, and di- 
vinely inspired word. Add to this blazing 
vesture of apocalyptic splendour the south 
tower of the west front, an unparalleled 
model of serene design, inscrutable propor- 
tions, and just composition; the porches of 
the transepts, which have no prototypes, no 
rivals, no possible successors, but stand as 
the revelation through some unknown 
master-masons of all that is final in in- 
spired design, and finally the sculpture, 
west, north, south, which leaves no further 
word to be said in the sensitive adaptation 
of this art to architecture, — combine all 
these and add a certain poignant spiritual 
aroma of the chanted worship and the old 
incense and the ascended prayers of seven 
centuries, and you have a thing that almost 
transcends experience and can only be ana- 
lyzed by Huysmans, only put into burning 
words by so consummate a lover and artist 
as Henry Adams. 

The thirteenth century goes on from 
Bourges and Chartres without a break to 
Coutances, Amiens, and Rheims. It goes 


[ 146 ] 





EXETER CATHEDRAL 


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THE MEDIZA.VAL SYNTHESIS 


on to innumerable other masterpieces as 
well, in England, Flanders, Spain, for de- 
spite the many small nationalities, perhaps 
because of them, Europe was practically an 
unity, fashioned, expressed, and made active 
through diversity. In France, however, 
perfection was most closely approached, 
and national, individual, stimulating as they 
are, the Gothic monuments of all these 
peoples never quite approached Chartres, 
Bourges, Coutances, Amiens, and Rheims 
in perfect organism, in perfect beauty, and 
in the indissoluble union of the two. In 
these masterpieces the progress of develop- 
ment from the simple to the complex, from 
the almost rudimentary norm of the Athe- 
nian temple, each portion of which was 
perfected to finality, on to the Catholic 
cathedral of the thirteenth century, where 
the norm is in itself complex and each de- 
tail raised almost to the level of Hellenic 
perfection, is steady and unbroken, and at 
Rheims we could see, only two years ago, 
the triumph of final achievement. 
Coutances is not French Gothic, it is 
Norman Gothic, just as the same art in 
England — barring Westminster — is Nor- 
man by descent. There is a great difference 


[ 147 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE: OF (GOT 


in this, and one that always should be re- 
garded, for it marks a great divergence and 
lessens the contrast so often drawn between, 
for example, Lincoln and Bourges. Cou- 
tances has the might and majesty of the 
work of Lanfranc, with the central tower 
so typically Norman and English. On the 
other hand its verticality is stupendous: it 
soars into the air with a swiftness and clarity 
of line almost without equal. The French 
cathedral does not do this: there is in it 
nothing ponderous, nothing earth-bound, 
but it seems to rise with a certain self- 
controlled majesty, expressing only its 
splendid logic and its magisterial calm. 
Coutances is like a troop of lifting spears, 
light, strong, exultant, and its effect comes 
from conscious design in form, not through 
wealth of fretted ornament, for of this there 
is little enough. As the chief monument 
of Norman Gothic it is a church that well 
deserves to be better known than it is. 

It is as hard to speak of Rheims as of the 
loved and newly dead. For every architect 
it had come to be the epitome of his art, 
the Parthenon of Christian architecture. 
For every friend of France, every devotee 
at the shrine of immortal history, it stood 

[ 148 | 


THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


as a radiant apotheosis. For those who still 
hold by Christianity it was a holy place, 
with a dim yet penetrating sanctity that 
silently conquered all doubt, all denial, all 
derision. There was none other quite like 
it; not St. Peter’s, nor Hagia Sophia; not 
even Westminster. ‘The insolence of heresy, 
the brutishness of revolution, the smug self- 
complacency of restoration had stripped it 
of its altars, its shrines, its tombs of unnum- 
bered kings, but even the destroyers had 
venerated its lofty majesty and respected its 
integrity, while the wars of six centuries 
had swept around its unscathed walls, im- 
potent for evil in the light of its stainless 

glory. 
- For two years it has lain under the fitful 
storming of shell and shrapnel, doomed to 
slow death because it is the crowning sym- 
bol of a great culture that is an offence to 
modernism in arms, and of a spirit in man 
and over man that may not be allowed to 
exist in the same world with its potent nega- 
tion. The glass that rivalled Chartres is 
splintered in starry dust on the blood-stained 
pavement and its fragments made the set- 
tings in soldiers’ rings. Its vault is burst 
asunder by bombs, its interior calcined by 


[ 149 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


conflagration, the incredible sculptures of 
its portals blasted and burned away. Yet 
it stands in its infinite majesty, gaunt and 
scathed in a circle of ruin, still the majestic 
fabric of a great people, a great epoch, a 
consummate art. 

It was the crowning monument, in mate- 
rial form, of Christian civilization; so per- 
fect in all its parts that it was perhaps too 
perfect, as being more than man should be 
permitted to attain, an infringement on the 
creative power of God. Beyond this was 
nothing greater, and in Amiens, which is 
chronologically but a few years younger, we 
already begin to feel the working of that 
pride of life and vainglory of conscious 
competence that forebodes the beginning of 
the decline. 

To most travellers, I suppose, Amiens is 
the most beautiful cathedral in France, the 
perfection of fully developed Gothic. Cer- 
tainly its towering interior, taller in pro- 
portion to its width than anything yet ac- 
complished, is awe-inspiring; its sculptures 
quite by themselves in their vivacity, their 
masterly design, and their subtle delicacy 
of execution. ‘The west front, wholly with- 
out stylistic consistency and dating from 


[ 150 ] 


THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


many periods, is lyric poetry done into 
stone. There is no other Gothic front 
quite like this in its pictorial composition, 
its wealth of intricate design (as rich 
as the masterpieces of the Flamboyant 
period without their lace-like texture and 
their irrational fantasticism), its marvellous 
carved ornament which is undeniably the 
most varied, original, and exquisite of any 
church in the world. In spite of this 
there is something lacking, or rather some- 
thing added that should not be there. Very 
hiddenly, very unwholesomely, human 
pride is asserting itself above the solemn 
devotion of Chartres, the serene Christian 
confidence of Rheims. Logic is winning 
the mastery, structural engineering is eating 
into architectural integrity. Higher and 
more tenuous the slim shafts lift themselves 
from the pavement: in the marvellous 
chevet stone is pared away until the thin 
masonry is like a perilous scaffolding: 
every foot of wall between buttresses gives 
place to the airy tracery of great windows, 
and the vault itself soars in the air as though 
held down by the taut pull of the colonettes 
instead of resting on them as on its natu- 
ral supports. Of course the painted glass 
[151 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


is nearly all gone, if it ever existed, and 
the vast interior, whitened by lamentable 
restorations, is a dizzy blaze of intoler- 
able light. Were these crystal walls glow- 
ing with the transcendental splendour of 
Chartres, or with the glory that was 
Rheims, our judgment might be different, 
for then Amiens would be the fulfilment 
of the dream of its daring creators, where 
now it is little more than the white ashes 
of burnt out fires. So great is the part 
played in Medieval architecture by this 
art of glass, created then out of nothing to 
add a new joy to life, a new wonder to the 
body of universal art. No church where 
sacrilege has extinguished this flame of life 
—and they are the vast majority in every 
land — should be judged as it stands any 
more than you would venture to estimate 
the value of the Brahms Requiem from an 
orchestral performance from which the 
voices of the soloists and chorus were ex- 
cluded, or the Fifth Symphony without the 
violins. With our taste hopelessly debased 
by the catastrophic products of glass-makers 
in the nineteenth century, we naturally can- 
not understand the part played of old by 
this triumphant art, unless we have seen for 
ise 


THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


ourselves the miracle of Chartres with its 
glass so providentially preserved. 

In any case, however, the lurking peril 
was there; not salient, not vociferous enough 
to injure its perfection, not sufficiently visi- 
ble to serve even as a warning, but the next 
stage was the chevet of Le Mans, and the 
final stage was Beauvais, and through these 
we can trace the first evidences of deca- 
dence back to Amiens, still serene in its 
perfect mastery. 

I have left myself scant space, indeed I 
have left no space at all, to deal with the 
other racial and national expressions of 
Medieval culture through the varied ver- 
sions of what was yet one definite Gothic 
style. This is unjust to Spain and Portugal, 
where a divergent Gothic showed itself 
early and ended at last in the fantastic and 
riotous fancies of Burgos and Poblet. It is 
unjust to western Germany and Austria, 
where, though late, a Teutonic version of 
French Gothic produced a few really na- 
tional masterpieces. It is unjust to Italy, 
for though the true Gothic, such as the 
ruined abbeys of Casamari and San Gal- 
gano, are merely Cistercian importations 
from Burgundy, the friars’ churches of the 


[153 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


sculptor Arnolfo not Gothic at all and very 
ugly at that, and the pictorial facades of 
Orvieto and Siena merely delightful essays 
in arbitrary design, there is a real Medieval 
expression in the unique churches of Sicily, 
with their mingling of Byzantine, Arab, and 
Norman genius, and in the developed Lom- 
bard of North Italy at Pisa, Lucca, Prato, 
Pistoja. It is doubly unjust to England, for 
there we find a school of undoubted Gothic 
which is quite unlike that of France, yet in 
spirit the same. The divergence is very 
complete. As I said before, English Gothic 
inherits directly from Normandy, not from 
France, and is therefore always more 
static, massive, and structurally conserva- 
tive. Moreover there is a fundamental dif- 
ference in genus due to the same difference 
in the people. As opposed to the French 
with their clear logic, which is sometimes 
almost cruel, the English are incorrigible 
sentimentalists, always thinking things are 
better than they are, and that they can easily 
make them better still by impulsive and 
almost unpremeditated action. Apparently 
we, ourselves, inherit directly from them 
and are therefore hopelessly addicted to the 
worship of abstract ideals which do not exist 


[ 154 ] 


PoE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS ° 


and would not work if they did, while our 
incorrigible optimism prevents our ever see- 
ing a danger (if it is clearly indicated for 
the future), or of recognizing its advent 
until the time for preventive action is past 
and nothing is possible but the desperate 
struggle for life. 

So in England we find, in her Medieval 
architecture, a curious clinging to estab- 
lished precedents, a shrinking from novel- 
ties in structural development, a more or 
less complete carelessness of logic, a doing 
of things because they like them that way 
and not because it is necessarily the reason- 
able thing to do. And yet, combined with 
this is always a curious and very appealing 
struggle toward the symbolical expression 
of things almost too high for expression. 
As the Norman abbeys are vaster, more 
dramatic, and more overpowering than their 
prototypes, with their massive construction, 
their cavernous portals, their giant piers, as 
at Gloucester, almost Egyptian in their pro- 
portions, so with Gothic, when it became 
the universal mode of expression. Vast 
towers lift themselves at the west and over 
the crossing; lancet windows prolong them- 
selves upward to improbable heights; new | 


[155 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


and irrational compositions are tried as in 
the astonishing west portals of Peterbor- 
ough, while the plan pulls itself out to in- 
ordinate lengths, and doubled transepts and 
great chapels prolong the awe-inspiring 
vistas, and add space beyond space to the 
blue mystery of nave and choir and aisles. 
It is all very appealing, particularly to us 
who are of the same blood and temper, but 
it offers a tempting opportunity to the 
mechanistic mind that thinks only in terms 
of logic, law, and clean-cut definitions. 

Of course it is true that we must judge 
English Gothic by what is left, and this not 
always of the best. What Henry VIII 
could not destroy was sacked and wrecked 
by the Puritan reformers, and what they 
left the nineteenth century pounced upon 
as prey for the “restorations” of Wyatt, 
Lord Grimthorpe, and Sir Gilbert Scott. 
Salisbury remains, with all its defects upon 
its head, but Guisborough is gone; of the 
great northern abbeys only fragments exist, 
and St. Mary’s Abbey, at York, which must 
have been the most perfect Gothic in 
England, after having stood roofless and 
crumbling for three centuries, yielded in 
the era of enlightenment, which is to say, 


[ 156 ] 


THE MEDIAVAL SYNTHESIS 


the early nineteenth century, to the cupid- 
ity of commercialism, and was pulled down 
and burned into lime. 

Some faint idea of the ruthless destruc- 
tion of the noblest art that was carried on 
under the direction of the “ Defender of 
the Faith” may be gained from Abbot 
(now Cardinal) Gasquet’s “Henry VIII 
and the English Monasteries,” but it is well 
to have in mind that the nineteenth century 
was even more ignorant and rapacious than 
the sixteenth, though its devastations were 
carried on with less violence, albeit with 
equal effectiveness. 


[157] 


LECTURE VI 


THE DECADENCE AND THE 
NEW PAGANISM 


I HAVE called this last of my lectures 
“The Decadence and the New Paganism,” 
but the title is incorrect as applied to all that 
immediately followed the crest of a great 
art as it manifested itself in Amiens, Lin- 
coln, and Rheims. For a long time to come 
it was to be a great art, gaining at one place 
what it lost at another, and in England los- 
ing nothing, but proceeding always on its 
serene way until it produced the first truly 
national style, that was still at its perfection 
when suddenly cut off by the Reformation. 
In society, however, the decadence was very 
real, and its inception almost immediate. 
When, in 1270, St. Louis, “ the very perfect 
king in Christiantie,’ went to his eternal 
reward, the climax had been reached, more 
man could not achieve than already had 
been won, and, as always in history, the 
curve began to ‘decline. 


[ 158 ] 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


Art did not follow this swift declension, 
for it never does. While it is true that art 
is engendered only by the power of a great 
ardour and a great righteousness in society, 
the impulse lasts long after the initial energy 
is spent. The wave that first shows itself 
in a low, long swell far out at sea, rising 
as it advances, and cresting on the edge of 
the shingle, to burst, fall, and disperse in 
shallow ripples, only to be sucked back into 
the abysses of the sea, casts, in falling, its 
wind-blown foam far forward, until it 
touches the very grasses of the shore. So 
with each epoch of civilization and its art; 
the curve of one is of longer radius, and 
tangent to the other, continuing, before its 
inevitable fall, long after the primal im- 
pulse has ceased to act. This is why we 
always find the highest achievements of any 
art synchronizing with that low level of 
ethics, of philosophy, of religion, of conduct 
that follows the epochs of noblest culture 
and most vivid and wholesome life. 

After St. Louis and St. Thomas, after 
Rheims and Dante, the curve was bound to 
decline. Already a very unpleasant form 
of heresy had raised its head in the south 
of France; the Crusades had degenerated 


[ 159 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


into marauding expeditions, and in the very 
first years of the fourteenth century the 
French crown had seized upon the Papacy, 
establishing over it the secular control 
Hildebrand had died to avert. “ The exile 
at Avignon” followed, with one after an- 
other of the French agents acting as pontiff, 
and in its trail came the “ Great Schism ”; 
a full century, in which secular control of 
the Church demonstrated all the loss of 
spiritual independence, all the paralyzing 
of the power of the Church in the defence 
of faith and morals, that is its inevitable 
corollary. Abandoned by its secular and 
spiritual sovereigns Italy lapsed at once into 
anarchy and an encroaching barbarism: in 
Germany the Empire broke down and a 
new and vicious form of feudalism took its 
place: the Hundred Years’ War devastated 
France and debauched the moral sense of 
England, while the Black Death swept 
Europe like a pestilential flood. Rebellion 
broke out against the ordered government 
of the European states, and once more the 
waves of invasion threatened the almost un- 
defended frontiers, this time in the shape 
of Turks and Tartars. The Latin Kingdom 
of Jerusalem fell, the fragments of the 
[ 160 ] 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


Eastern Empire shrunk smaller and closer 
under the endless assaults of Bulgars and 
Turks, although in Spain the tide had 
turned and Ferdinand III was steadily 
crushing back the Moslems that at one time 
had threatened all Europe. 

It was a time of terrible choice, of criti- 
cal peril, but as yet the day was not neces- 
sarily lost. A Philip Augustus, an Otto III, 
an Anselm, a Thomas a Becket, a Leo IX, 
a Hildebrand, might have met the crisis 
and theoretically at least have saved civi- 
lization. Italy alone had definitely aposta- 
tized from its Medieval ideals, Germany 
and France were but in the first stages of 
infection, while England was as yet wholly 
immune and Spain vigorous with strong 
new life. A firm hand in the Papacy, right- 
eous kings in France and Germany, a new 
Cluny or a new Citeaux, might have saved 
the day. Instead Philip the Fair comes to 
blight all St. Louis had brought into flower; 
the earlier Hapsburgs could not avert the 
nemesis of Germanic order prepared by the 
last of the Hohenstaufens. ‘The Mendicant 
Orders, in spite of the best intentions in 
the world, formed but dissolving bulwarks 
against a tide that had broken helplessly 


Prior | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


before the inviolable ramparts of Benedic- 
tinism, whatever its special form or name. 
Inch by inch the virus engendered in Italy 
during the time of its abandonment by the 
Popes crept through the veins of Europe. 
Northward it advanced without stay on that 
progress that was not to cease until at last, 
two hundred years later, it was to achieve 
during the tyranny of the regents of Ed- 
ward VI final supremacy over England, the 
last stronghold of Christian civilization. 
All this was happening darkly under- 
neath, on the surface was a brave show 
of culture and refinement. Chivalry was 
flaunting its splendid pageantry from sea to 
sea, and almost every year was born some 
child who later was to be the voicing of a 
great civilization only the dregs of which 
remained to him. Nearly all the great 
painters of Christendom were born in that 
century that reached from the beginning of 
the “Great Schism” to the election of 
the Borgia — Alexander VI. With them 
came the Blessed Jeanne d’Arc, Savonarola, 
Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, Bayard, St. 
Ignatius Loyola, St. Philip Neri; but simul- 
taneously those whose destiny it was to play 
each his part in bringing a great epoch to 
[ 162 | 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


an end in ignorance, anarchy, and apostasy: 
Machiavelli, Luther, Cranmer, Thomas 
Cromwell, Henry VIII, and the spawn of 
the house of Borgia. 

It was a field of Armageddon; the armies 
were drawing together, all the hosts of 
Heaven waited expectant, and in the year 
1453 the great battle began. Constantinople 
fell before the devouring Turks, and over 
Italy poured the flood of decadent philos- 
ophy, evil morals, and false learning that 
had festered there during the last years of 
Byzantine corruption. It came in specious 
and engaging guise: the spirit of the early 
Renaissance (which was really Christian 
and beneficent in so many ways) seized upon 
it with avidity, wolfed it down, good and 
evil alike, and was transmuted into a thing 
profligate, atheist, anarchical. Nicholas V 
and Pius II tried too late to stem the tide 
and turn it into the channel of compromise. 
They were followed by an Alexander VI, 
a Julius II, anda Leo X. Savonarola, fight- 
ing almost single-handed against the hell- 
let-loose in Italy, went to his martyrdom. 
Cardinal Cusa, St. John Capistran, and 
Erasmus were swept before the whirlwind 
unleashed by Luther and Zwingli. Calvin, 
[ 163 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


Beza, and the Huguenots, acting in bloody 
concert with Marie de Medicis and a Ca- 
tholicism now almost wholly debauched by 
Italy, turned France into a shambles. The 
temporal victory remained with the Catho- 
lics, but it was empty of righteousness and, 
unchecked, the Renaissance went on its 
course. At last the cliffs of England, that 
had so long withstood the rising tide, 
yielded to its assault, and Henry, Crom- 
well, and Cranmer rose to triumph over Sir 
Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and the mar- 
tyrs of monasticism. The exile at Avignon 
had borne its fruit and Catholic civilization 
had come to an end. What followed was 
new: whether for good or ill is not to be 
considered now, but it was in no sense 
Catholic, and, whether for good or ill, the 
Middle Ages were Catholic, first, last, and 
always. 

There was little enough of all this in the 
architecture that followed immediately on 
Amiens and Rheims. Beyond their organic 
perfection there is no further field for 
development, except along the lines of en- 
gineering, and this becomes ever more bril- 
liant and more daring. The chevet of Le 
Mans is a degree beyond that of Amiens 


[ 164 | 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


in its delicacy, its complicated articulation, 
and its beauty; a magical web of stone. 
Beauvais passes the perilous edge, and as 
even today, in the heyday of efficiency and 
consummate engineering, the bridges of 
able experts will fall now and then, so in 
France experience rose superior to logic 
and mechanism and made them of no avail. 
Beauvais was taller than Amiens, more at- 
tenuated than Le Mans, and twelve years 
after it was finished it crumbled and fell 
into its own nave. Rebuilt, with humiliat- 
ingly necessary reinforcements, it acquired 
new transepts that were finished in 1550, 
and a central spire nearly 450 feet high. 
Again ruin overtook it; the incredible spire 
fell and was never again rebuilt, while the 
nave had never even been begun; so the 
cathedral remains a monument of the deca- 
dence; truncated, patched up, semi-ruinous, 
as Paris stands for the crescent years of Me- 
dizvalism, Rheims for its culmination. 
Beauvais is sheer beauty, unalloyed, and 
therein lay its weakness. Its choir, as you 
first see it, towering above the huddled 
houses below, is so marvellous that you 
catch your breath in awe and admiration. 
It is not wire-drawn and frail like Le Mans, 


[ 165 | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


but composed of solid and almost unorna- 
mented buttresses, lifting dizzily into the 
air, and thin lace-like arcs springing one 
above the other toward the crystal walls of 
the clerestory. No finer conception exists, 
and no more brilliant and poetic design. 
As for the transepts, which were not begun 
until the first years of the sixteenth century, 
they are of the last Gothic of France at its 
best, and this best was good indeed if you 
consider it as pure decoration. Where this 
new style, called Flamboyant, came from, 
and why, is one of the architectural mys- 
teries. ‘The balanced art of Amiens con- 
tinued along established lines for a genera- 
tion, then froze slowly into a respectable 
formalism that ceased suddenly when the 
civilization that had created it perished for 
the time being in war and desolation. For 
almost a century art of every kind was in- 
operative, and when it began again it was 
on sudden and novel and, it must be con- 
fessed, very captivating lines. 

When St. Louis died, he left France rich, 
powerful, happy. He himself had become 
the most dominant prince in Christendom, 
and there seemed no reason why his people 
should not enjoy in peace, for generations, 

[ 166 | 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


the fruit of his noble and knightly labours. 
Less than seventy years after his death, and 
just a century after the consecration of 
Rheims, the ‘“ Hundred Years’ War ” broke 
out, and under the unrighteous scourging 
of the English king, France was wrecked, 
pillaged, devastated, and reduced to the 
lowest levels of misery and humiliation. 
All the north and east were swept by a 
whirlwind of destruction almost like that 
which has come on Flanders and Cham- 
pagne during these latter years, only then 
the cathedrals and abbeys and churches 
stood inviolate, rising in the purity of their 
new white stone. alone in the abomination 
of desolation. 

By the year 1270 architecture had become 
largely stereotyped along fine but mechan- 
ical lines, St. Ouen, Rouen, serving as a 
good example, and no great original works 
were attempted except Limoges, Narbonne, 
and Alby. With the English war work 
stopped altogether, and yet, after a space 
of sixty years, and at the very moment of 
the deepest humiliation of France, sud- 
denly, somehow, came the flush of a new 
art, as though to signalize the birth of the 
girl who was to listen, alone amongst the 


[ 167 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


people of her race, to the mystical Voices, 
and, at the head of a regenerated army, lead 
her king to his crowning in Rheims, and 
redeem France. The Blessed Joan of Arc 
was born in 1411, and seven years later 
Notre Dame de |’Epine was begun, the first 
considerable example of the wonderful new 
art that seemed to grow out of death and 
corruption, as though men were sick from 
inordinate misery and turned to beauty, as 
they were turning back to religion, to find 
there their only consolation. Caudebec fol- 
lowed in 1426, St. Maclou in 1432, the tran- 
septs of Beauvais in 1500 and the church 
at Brou in 1505. It was a century of the 
most exuberant worship of beauty: hardly 
a church in France lacks some embellish- 
ment of this period, for the coming of peace 
in 1456 found a chastened people, who set 
to work to express their new liberty and 
their gratitude in the old and honourable 
way. ' | 

Some say the artistic stimulus came from 
Flanders, some even from England, which 
in this instance deserved so little either of 
gratitude or of imitation, but it seems to 
me that there was material enough already 
in France. What was done was the isola- 

[ 168 ] 





AMIENS CaTHEDRAL 


XIV. 


a 


a, 





DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


tion of the decorative and artistic forms 
from their structural context, and the trans- 
forming of these into a magnificent and 
ingenious scheme of ornamentation. So 
considered it offers little opportunity for 
adverse criticism. It is a wonderful com- 
plex of exquisite lines, supple, and flowing: 
of crisp, close-set carving, of buttresses that 
have been transformed into fretted spires, 
of spires that become lace-like canopies, of 
canopies that toss themselves like spray into 
the air. In spite of its riotous abundance, 
its whimsical fancy, its overwrought senti- 
ment, it is always in good taste in France, 
and usually in Flanders, though in Spain 
and Portugal it rapidly became turgid and 
ugly, while in Germany it ended by being 
ridiculous. 

From the first it grew steadily better in 
France, and often reached heights of posi- 
tive greatness, as in the Tour de Beurre of 
Rouen, and in Malines cathedral. Notre 
Dame at Louviers, St. Maclou at Rouen, 
and Alencon are toys, but St. Germain at 
Amiens is a consistent and admirable little 
church, as are many others of the same kind 
throughout the country. In almost every 
case, however, the beauty is external: within 

[ 169 | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


the work is dry, thin, often ugly in propor- 
tion, which is evidence of the great change 
that has taken place in motive. Secularism 
is dominant, wealth and luxury increasing, 
and for the first time outside show takes 
precedence of the worship of God. Beauty 
is now sought for its own sake, not as divine 
service, and the end is not far away. “ Art 
for art’s sake” will serve for a time and 
produce the show of esthetic competence, 
but it is impermanent as a motive force and 
its ultimate degeneration and extinction are 
not to be escaped. 

In England the last phase of Christian 
architecture was the exact antithesis of that 
on the Continent. We already have seen 
that the English Gothic was based on Nor- 
man rather than on French foundations and 
therefore static and conservative; curiously 
enough it is emotional, as opposed to the 
clear logic, the nervous energy of develop- 
ment, and the intellectualism of France. It 
passed through many phases from the Nor- 
man William of Sens to the ultra-English 
William of Wykehan, striking out concep- 
tions of wonderful beauty, such as Netley 
Abbey and St. Mary’s, York, the eastern 
transepts of Durham and Fountains, Lin- 


[170 ] 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


coln choir and presbytery, Guisborough, 
Exeter, Beverly. It devised those wide, 
low compositions that are the charm of 
English cathedral landscape; it created 
towers of singular grace and nobility, and 
west fronts of varied and novel majesty. 
It invented and perfected the vaulted chap- 
ter house and made the abbey and the coun- 
try church models of almost faultless design. 
It turned the simple and little-varied pro- 
files of mouldings, and the somewhat stereo- 
typed pier and arch sections, of France and 
Normandy, into living forms of infinite 
vitality and variety, and in its carved deco- 
ration it has no rival. It is true Gothic of 
a very personal and national character, but 
it is not the greatest Gothic because it is 
undeveloped in its structural organism. 

- At the very moment when French Gothic 
had hardened into a series of formula, that 
is to say, the first quarter of the fourteenth 
century, English Gothic took up an entirely 
new line of development that was to give it 
a fresh but evanescent glory. It began as 
a scheme of decoration, with the remodel- 
ling of the choirs of Gloucester and Canter- 
bury, and of the Norman Winchester from 
end to end. All this work is practically 


[171 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


contemporaneous and runs from about 1350 
to 1400. It is quite unstructural and con- 
sists chiefly in a sheathing of thin stone, 
where all the lines are predominantly ver- 
tical, very numerous, and delicate to a de- 
gree in their profiles and sections. The 
revolt from the massive forms and strong, 
rich lights and shadows of the earlier work 
is startling. New forms of arch are de- 
vised — three-centred, four-centred, ellip- 
tical, segmental — and the vaulting, which 
already had been marvellously enriched, as 
at Exeter, with many intermediate ribs, took 
on new shapes, on curious circular or curved 
section lines, until it came to be known as 
fan vaulting. Geometrical tracery gave 
place to many vertical bars, with cross mul- 
lions, and ingenious new line-combinations 
for the heads, while ornament swerved 
from the exquisitely naturalistic forms of 
the thirteenth century and became conven- 
tionalized and heraldic. 

If we were to judge this nascent style 
from its earliest efforts we should be forced 
to condemn it as a piece of unstructural 
artificiality, but no sooner had it made itself 
fashionable, which it did at once and most 
inordinately, than a curious thing happened. 


[e724 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


Beginning as a scheme of surface decora- 
tion, it proceeded to change its whole nature 
and become logically structural, and so, at 
last, England actually acquired a form of 
architectural expression which was not only 
quite original, but more consistent, as an 
organic scheme, than anything that had gone 
before. At once the old and almost cum- 
bersome bulk of the Gothicized Norman 
gave place to the nervous and completely 
articulated system of Perpendicular. Col- 
umns became slim and widely spaced, walls 
were thinned to curtains and then to mere 
veils of glass in a slender scaffolding of 
stone mullions. The angular and ugly criss- 
crossing of irrational ribs that had defaced 
the vaulting of the latest Decorated and the 
earliest Perpendicular work, disappeared, 
and fan vaulting, delicately panelled, and 
split into thin severies by sheaves of slim 
ribs, took its place. ‘The rich and sonor- 
ous glass of the thirteenth century gave place 
to pale and opalescent compositions of the 
most delicate yet vivid colour, and this 
bright adornment spread itself over shafts 
and walls and vault until the whole interior 
became a jewel-box of colour and beaten 
gold. 

[173 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


It was the gayest of all gay styles, flaunt- 
ing all the glittering pageantry of chivalry, 
and expressing in perfect form the luxury 
and the ease and the pride of life that just 
preceded the Reformation. A great style, 
though narrow in its scope and secular 
rather than religious, it imposed itself on 
England to such a degree that it became the 
only possible style, and it produced not 
alone such positive works of genius as the 
cloister of Gloucester and its Lady Chapel, 
the vaults of Oxford Cathedral and Sher- 
borne, King’s College Chapel and that of 
Henry VII at Westminster, but as well a 
bewildering galaxy of town and country 
churches. England was growing rich and 
full of plenty: her people were still free 
citizens, there was as yet no proletariat and 
no capitalism, the monasteries had not been 
suppressed, and in spite of the Wars of the 
Roses and the Black Death, there was 
greater wealth, more justly distributed, than 
anywhere else in the world. It was “ Mer- 
rie England ” in truth, and the general con- 
tent and prosperity showed themselves in 
an incredible amount of building, both re- 
ligious and secular, and the embellishing of 
the old sanctuaries with a fabulous wealth 


[174] 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


of altars, chantries, screens, tombs, chapels, 
porches, sculptures, and decorations. It is 
a pity so little of all this exquisite embel- 
lishment has remained. Within a century 
the major part was beaten into dust, melted 
into bullion, or sold for building-stones and 
old metal by the dull-witted and rapacious 
servants of Henry VIII; and later came 
“the tiger’s cub” Edward VI, Elizabeth, 
the Puritans, and the nineteenth century. 
We are thankful for what we have, but its 
strange beauty makes us hopelessly covetous 
of the inestimable treasures we have lost. 
Toward the end architecture itself hard- 
ened a little and lost its spontaneous gaiety 
and its delicate fancifulness, but in domestic 
building and in the country churches it con- 
tinued to the very end. Abbot Huby’s fine 
tower at Fountains had only just been fin- 
ished when the vast abbey was handed over 
to pillage and destruction, and the same 
is true of the lost Edgar Chapel at Glaston- 
bury. Prior Moon’s great tower at Bolton 
had only risen a third of its height at the 
Suppression, and I myself have found at 
Fairford the patterns on the unfinished 
stone, stencilled there by some sixteenth cen- 
tury apprentice in preparation for the mas- 
[175 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


ter carver who was to come the next day to 
begin his carving. He did not come, nor 
ever will, though four centuries have passed 
since word came that the spoilers were on 
their way and that no more might be done 
for the glory of God or for sheer joy in the 
doing of beautiful things. 

Gothic art did not die of inanition. When 
the Reformation broke it had before it great 
possibilities. Already it had begun to in- 
corporate the delicate craftsmanship of 
Italian sculptors, full of the new wine of 
the Early Renaissance, and had the world 
not been convulsed by a destructive revolu- 
tion yet another page might have been 
added to the annals of Christian art, which 
did not die, but was incontinently slain, 
that a new era and a new art might come 
to birth. | 

After the anarchy and the awful destruc- 
tion of the Reformation period had some- 
what abated, and the new era begun, the old 
art was gone and something entirely new 
had taken its place. ‘This is true at least 
of official art, the art of the new class 
of professional artists, of the constructive 
agencies in Church and State, of the new 
“upper classes’ who were now completely 


[ 176 | 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


differentiated from the (also new) prole- 
tariat. Amongst the peasantry and the 
country folk and the minor lords and squires 
the old fashion lingered on, and for a cen- 
tury or more the old ways held for the 
country churches (though few new ones 
were needed now), the cottages, and manors, 
and minor chateaux. It was a declining in- 
fluence, however; little by little the peas- 
antry lost their freedom, the squires and 
lords their independence, the priests their 
piety, the bishops and canons their intelli- 
gence, and by the end of the seventeenth 
century the last vestige of Medieval art had 
disappeared. Will you have patience with 
me while I try to trace the circumstances 
of this great revolution? 

When the spirit of the Middle Ages 
finally established itself throughout western 
Europe, the last traces of paganism had dis- 
appeared from religion, from philosophy, 
and from the social organism. The spirit 
of antiquity was that of obedience to nature 
and the worship of reason, with force as 
the ultima ratio. Its religion was the deifi- 
cation of the attributes of nature, from lust 
to power; its philosophy, the establishing of 
standards and the apprehension of absolute 

E277 | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


truth through process of reason; the foun- 
dation of its society, slavery and the ar- 
bitrament of physical force. This spirit of 
antiquity which we call paganism had con- 
tinued for five centuries after the Christian 
Era, side by side with the new faith, and 
though it had yielded here and there in re- 
ligion and philosophy, it maintained itself 
almost unhampered in the organization of 
society, which was still definitely founded 
on slavery. When the Empire broke down 
in ruin, these partially submerged qualities 
of paganism regained control of the West. 
The first protest was on the instant, and at 
the hands of St. Benedict, who led the re- 
volt of those who were compelled to with- 
draw from an intolerable world, under the 
novel banner of Poverty, Chastity, Obedi- 
ence, and Labour, the four antitheses to all 
that paganism had held fundamental. For 
five centuries, with most indifferent or 
ephemeral results, Christianity strove to 
establish its own principles over those of 
paganism, and for the two following cen- 
turies it waged a warfare so successful that 
in the end these principles stood supreme, 
if not in universal action, at least in theoret- 
ical acceptance. The spirit of antiquity had 


E1784 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


declared that there was nothing higher than 
physical and human nature, except human 
reason, and that by the following of nature 
and reason men should become as gods. 
Christianity had preached a human nature 
corrupted by sin, but through the Incarna- 
tion and the Atonement glorified anew and 
subject to salvation through the grace of 
God, and explicitly by means of the or- 
dained Sacraments of the Church. The two 
conceptions were built up on opposed bases 
and were different in toto. The Christian 
conception won, and for nearly five cen- 
turies determined the nature of religion, 
created an entirely new philosophy, and or- 
ganized a society that had no prototype as 
it has had as yet no successor of like nature. 

The five elements entering into the 
make-up of Medizvalism were: Northern 
blood, monasticism, the Catholic Faith, 
Sacramental philosophy, and the Christian 
commonwealth. It would be manifestly im- 
possible to consider, even superficially, all 
these contributing causes, though all were 
operative in the production of the art we 
have been considering. While, however, 
the first four created the content of art and 
determined its indwelling spirit, it was the 


[179 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


last that was chiefly instrumental in fixing 
the forms. Its complete destruction, within 
a brief space of years, had more than all 
else to do with the corresponding transfor- 
mation of art from its Christian and Mediz- 
val nature to its pagan and Renaissance (or 
modern) form. For this reason, and be- 
cause the Christian commonwealth is little 
understood and generally misrepresented, I 
must speak of it, though as briefly as 
possible. | 

During the reconstruction of Europe 
after the fall of Rome, slavery tended, 
though by almost imperceptible degrees, to 
disappear. With the opening of the true 
Middle Ages its doom was sealed, and the 
fully developed Medizval society founded 
itself on an entirely new basis. Slavery 
(domestic, industrial, and economic) had 
been the universal law of antiquity, a small 
group of individuals holding and control- 
ling the land (that is to say, the chief means 
of production), together with all other 
forms of wealth and wealth-producing 
power. The vast majority of men existed 
by sufferance, without any personal means 
of production, and were maintained and 
permitted to breed simply because without 

[ 180 ] 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


their enforced labour the potential wealth 
in land, or other property, could not be 
made operative. Wives and children were 
chattels over whom the man frequently had 
the power of life and death, while over the 
labour, the persons, and the lives of the 
slaves the lord had almost unrestricted 
authority to do with them as he liked. 
Under the Medieval system the old 
Latin villa, or tract of land under the ab- 
solute ownership of a dominus, or lord, 
who worked it through his corps of slaves, 
had, through the process of feudalism, and 
by the ninth century, been wholly trans- 
formed. ‘The estate was now divided into 
three portions, one the private property of 
the lord, one reserved to the tenants who 
practically though not as yet legally owned 
it, the third held for the common use of 
lord and yeomanry. By the twelfth cen- 
tury custom had determined the nature of 
the rent the peasant should pay his lord for 
use of the land, and what the lord was bound 
to render him in return, and by the four- 
teenth century peasant ownership was prac- 
tically unquestioned. He could not be 
evicted from his land; it descended from 
father to son, and the rent paid either in 
[ 181 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


kind or in money or in service was a small 
portion of the total possible income. ‘This 
formed the tax the peasant paid; it was 
definite and limited, and no more in pro- 
portion to his income than the “ State, 
county, town, and school tax” of today, let 
alone the question of indirect taxation of 
the innumerable kinds now in vogue. To 
put the case in a few words, the man on 
the land controlled the means of produc- 
tion, whereas both before Medievalism and 
after the means of production were and are 
in the hands of a small group of landlords 
or capitalists. 

Simultaneously trade and industry were 
developing along similar lines through the 
guilds. These were voluntary societies, 
covering all possible lines of activity, partly 
co-operative, but made up of private in- 
dividuals owning and controlling their own 
means of production. Each body was self- © 
governing, and it looked out for the educa- 
tion of the children of its members, gave 
aid and nursing in sickness, and burial at 
death. Above all it encouraged emulation 
amongst its members, but checked compe- 
tition, guarded their rights and the scale of 
their wages, upheld the standards of work- 

[ 182 ] 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


manship, and jealously controlled the di- 
vision of profits to prevent a great share 
falling into the hands of the few to the 
impoverishment of the many. 

During the three great centuries of the 
central Middle Ages, there was neither 
slavery nor a division of society between a 
small group of capitalists (or owners of 
the means of production), on the one hand, 
and a vast proletariat made up of men dis- 
possessed of the means of production on the 
other. Between the lord and the yeoman 
the difference was less of kind than of de- 
gree, while the priesthood, monasticism, and 
chivalry gave free and wide opportunities 
for ability to rise, as by a natural process, 
from one social scale to another, until it 
was no uncommon thing for a yeoman’s son 
to become, on the one hand, page, squire, 
knight, baron, count; on the other, novice, 
monk, abbot, bishop, cardinal, and even 
Pope. If democracy consists, as it does, in 
abolition of privilege, and equal opportun- 
ity for all, then the Middle Ages form the 
only democracy of record, and if Catholi- 
cism had produced nothing else it deserves 
eternal honour for making this possible. 

Through the guilds the same “ carriére 


[ 183 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


ouverte aux talents’? was made available, 
and ability alone determined whether the 
apprentice should remain such, or become 
the builder of Amiens or Rheims. Through 
the zealous guarding of standards, work- 
manship and artistic quality progressed 
steadily, and through co-operation a score 
of groups of independent artists and crafts- 
men worked in unison on the same building, 
with the same end in view, and with no 
quarrelling over precedence or the inva- 
sion of each other’s territory. Is it any 
wonder that during the epoch of this only 
Christian commonwealth art should have 
flourished, and that Christian architecture 
should have been what it was? 

Let us now consider the great revolu- 
tion whereby the Middle Ages gave way to 
the Renaissance, Gothic to neo-classic, and 
Christianity to a revived paganism. 

In the year 1250, the central moment of 
the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire 
was dissolved. It was re-established in Ger- 
many alone, and Italy lost all effective and 
centralized government. From that mo- 
ment anarchy began and came to its full 
estate as soon as the Papacy, the last centre 
of order, was removed to Avignon. No 


[ 184 ] 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


description could do justice to the carni- 
val of profligacy and crime that reigned 
throughout Italy. Unscrupulous adventur- 
ers seized on power by force and fraud, 
extinguishing civil and moral rights and 
abandoning themselves to a career of 
treason, murder, treachery, poisoning, and 
almost inconceivable debauchery. All 
ethical standards were broken down; re- 
ligion was derided, the authority of the 
Church in faith and morals was scorned 
and disregarded, and a complete return 
made to the spirit of antiquity, in that na- 
ture — human nature and reason — became 
the arbiter of conduct. All the hard-won 
liberties of the individual, the associations, 
and the communes disappeared in a pan- 
demonium of tyranny. When this new 
spirit clothed itself with wealth, luxury, 
magnificence, art, and the patronage of let- 
ters, that it might hide its indelible blood- 
stains and extinguish by its glory all 
memory of its inconceivable crimes, Italy 
had become, as of old, a centre of omnipo- 
tent lords holding all power, all the means 
of production, with a vast proletariat, dis- 
possessed, impoverished, and reduced to 
practical slavery. 

[ 185 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


The return to paganism in society and 
morals may have initiated, or it may simply 
have synchronized with, a corresponding 
return to pagan ideals in art. In any case 
the return was made, and in the midst of 
murder and outrage all Italy turned to the 
classical remains of letters, philosophy, and 
all the arts. The powerful vital force en- 
gendered by Mediavalism, at that very 
moment beginning there fully to express 
itself, was diverted into new channels, and 
an unexampled artistic splendour shone 
over the ruin of Christian society and the 
inauguration of the new paganism; pal- 
liating its crimes and almost justifying its 
pretensions. 

From Italy this enthralling new spirit 
extended itself little by little over all Eu- 
rope. It came, as it could, in fascinating 
form; and on the strength of its art, its new 
learning, its lavish splendour, found ready 
acceptance. At once, however, its poison 
began to work, — in society, in philosophy, 
and in religion. By this time the Church 
itself, almost wholly in Italy, increasingly 
in France and Germany, had made its sur- 
render, and the power the first of the new 
pagans fought furiously because of its stand 

[ 186 | 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


for Christian morals and Christian faith, 
was now their fellow and accessory. The 
monasteries held out longest against the in- 
sanity of fundamental humanism, some of 
them successfully, but their influence be- 
came less and less, and finally almost 
negligible. | 

The pagan revolution in Italy resulted 
in the temporary abandonment of Christian 
faith and morals, and in the acquisition of 
all the wealth and the means of production 
by a group of omnipotent assassins. In 
France, while religion still held a formal 
supremacy, its effectiveness was appallingly 
diminished, morals degenerated, though less 
fatally than in the south, but the social 
revolution was quite as complete and re- 
sulted through the Wars of Religion in an 
equal extinguishing of Medieval liberty 
and the mingling in the crown of all power, 
all authority, and an enormous area of ter- 
ritory from which the new proletariat had 
been dispossessed. 

In England the Renaissance came slowly, 
so far as its esthetic and literary amenities 
are concerned, and its religious and philo- 
sophical corollaries as well. Curiously 
enough, however, the economic revolution 


(e873) 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


made its way more rapidly. In the early 
fifteenth century the great mass of English- 
men owned the land on which they lived 
and laboured, and all other means of pro- 
duction as well. Wealth was distributed 
with a close approach to evenness, and was 
more abundant than in any other part of 
Europe. The greatest landlord was the | 
Church, holding something over a quarter 
of the land, but the taxes (or rents) were 
low, collected with unbusinesslike leniency, 
and largely established by immemorial cus- 
tom and therefore subject to little change. 
By the beginning of the sixteenth century 
the group of landholders had begun to 
increase their holdings, while the small 
owners were diminishing innumber. There 
was little as yet that was alarming in the 
change, which might easily have been ar- 
rested, but at this critical moment occurred 
the greatest economic disaster England has 
ever known, the suppression of the monas- 
teries, and the giving over of their vast lands 
to the cabal of new and needy and greedy 
nobles who had been called (and who had 
paid) to take the place of the men of old 
honour who had fallen during the Wars 
of the Roses. A fourth of the wealth- 
[ 188 ] 





Beauvais CATHEDRAL 


XV. 





DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


producing land of England was at a blow 
handed over to a very sorry group of knaves 
and sycophants, mostly of inferior blood: 
tenants by tens of thousands were dispos- 
sessed and driven out to starve or turn out- 
law, and in ten years England had ceased 
to be a Commonwealth, and had become, as 
Italy and France, a nation made up of a 
land-owning and wealth-controlling minor- 
ity on the one hand, a proletarian and help- 
less and poverty-stricken majority on the 
other. 

In a century the whole social fabric of 
Europe had been revolutionized, and the 
Medieval system of an approximate equal- 
ity in landholding, in possession of the 
means of production, and in the distribu- 
tion of wealth (and therefore in opportu- 
nity), had given place to the Capitalistic 
State, consisting of an absolute and ever- 
increasing inequality in all these elements 
that form the only foundation for a just and 
righteous commonwealth. 

Meanwhile another series of catastrophies 
had overtaken Europe in the shape of cer- 
tain great wars which marked the rise and 
progress of the Renaissance and Reforma- 
tion, wars compared with which the mili- 

[ 189 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE ‘OF (GOURaG 


tary expeditions of Medievalism were mere 
skirmishes. Their results were equally un- 
like, and of a most fatal nature. During 
Medizvalism the nobility in every Chris- 
tian country of Europe was of pure north- 
ern stock, tracing its lineage back to the 
hardy lands around the Baltic. So was the 
great mass of the people, except in Spain, 
southern France, and the lower half of 
Italy, but underneath was always a sub- 
stratum of the round-headed Alpine race 
of which the present southern Slavs are a 
part, with, in the south, a debased mixture 
of many servile strains. ‘The Crusades and 
the wars of Medievalism had cut into the 
noble and peasant classes of northern blood 
in about equal proportions, but now some- 
thing very different was to occur, and this 
was a series of wide and long-drawn-out 
conflicts in which the men of the purest 
blood and best traditions and highest men- 
tality were practically exterminated. 

The Wars of the Roses, the Thirty Years’ 
War in Germany, the Wars of Religion in 
France and Flanders, and, later, the reli- — 
gious persecutions in England, with the 
wars of the Commonwealth, struck pri- 
marily at the class of nobles, knights, and 

[ 190 ] 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


gentlemen, and secondarily at the yeomanry 
of northern blood, so planing away all the 
wonderful superstructure of culture, char- 
acter, and chivalry, and releasing the low- 
est strata of all, which came swiftly to the 
top, and, with no traditions of culture, 
character, or chivalry, assumed to fill the 
depleted ranks. 

Of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany 
and its results on the race and society, 
Madison Grant says: 

“Tt destroyed an entire generation, tak- 
ing each year for thirty years the finest 
manhood of the nation. Two-thirds of the 
population of Germany was destroyed in 
some states, such as Bohemia; while out of 
500,000 people in Wurttemberg there were 
only 48,000 left at the end of the war... . 
From that time on the purely Teutonic race 
in Germany has been largely replaced by 
the Alpine type in the south and the Wend- 
ish and Polish types in the east. . . . Out 
of 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German 
Empire only 9,000,000 are purely ‘Teutonic. 
Meeeeiae addition the Thirty Years’*War 
virtually destroyed the land-owning yeo- 
manry and lesser gentry formerly found in 
~Germany as numerously as in France or in 


[ 191 | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHRIG 


England. . . . This section of the popula- 
tion was largely exterminated, and the class 
of gentlemen practically vanishes from Ger- 
man history from that time on. When the 
Thirty Years’ War was over there remained 
in Germany nothing except the brutalized 
peasantry, and the high nobility which 
turned from the toils of endless warfare to 
mimic on a small scale the Court of Ver- 
sailles. Today the ghastly rarity in the 
German armies of chivalry and generosity 
toward women and of knightly protection 
and courtesy toward the prisoners and 
wounded can be largely attributed to this 
annihilation of the gentle class. The Ger- 
mans of today, whether they live on the 
farms or in the cities, are for the most part 
descendants of the peasants who survived, 
not of the brilliant knights and hardy foot 
soldiers who fell in that mighty conflict.” 
The result of the wars of the fifteenth, 
the sixteenth, and the seventeenth centuries 
in France and England was less terribly 
comprehensive, but the same in nature. All 
the fine flower of Medieval culture was 
swept away; debased and adulterated stock 
came to the surface and ruthlessly gathered 
the power and the means of production into 


[ 192 ] 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


its own hands. ‘The hold of religion was 
gone, the monasteries suppressed, the cus- 
toms and relationships of feudal society 
superseded by force and by class legislation, 
and at the very moment of complete success 
came the great industrial discoveries of coal 
and iron as potentialities of wealth, whose 
infinite possibilities had been unlocked by 
the solving of the problem of steam as 
manageable energy. One invention fol- 
lowed another, with endless new discov- 
eries, each of which might be given an in- 
dustrial application. ‘The proletariat, made 
out of the free citizens of a dead Medieval- 
ism, could not use them, but the new class 
of capitalists made out of the up springing 
dregs of a dead civilization, could and did, 
now that all restraining influences had been 
‘removed, and since they were the holders 
of all wealth and all wealth-producing 
agencies. The result was Industrial Civi- 
lization, of which Alfred Russell Wal- 
lace could write, in the year before the 
War: 

‘Tt is not too much to say that our whole 
system of society is rotten from top to 
bottom, and the Social Environment as a 
whole, in relation to our possibilities and 


[ 193 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


our claims, is the worst that the world has 
ever seen.” 

I have called this, my last lecture, ‘‘ The 
Decadence and the New Paganism.” I 
have apologized for using the word “ deca- 
dence” as applied to the latest architecture 
of Medizvalism, but I have no apologies 
to make for applying the words “new 
paganism ” to the scheme of life that took 
the place of that of the great five centuries 
of Christian civilization. Do not misun- 
derstand me: I do not claim for Mediz- 
val society any degree of perfection. ‘The 
most constructive student of the time Amer- 
ica has yet produced, Henry Osborne Tay- 
lor, has written of what he calls “the 
spotted actuality.” It was “ spotted,” min- 
gled of good and evil, as are all peoples, 
all generations, all men, and as these must 
be mingled of good and evil for all time. 
I do declare the thesis, however, that it was 
a time when the principles of Christianity 
were the dominant and controlling force, 
and when the “ spotted actuality ” contained 
a greater proportion of good than has been 
recorded in history either before or since. 

The new paganism was in religion, in 
philosophy, in sociology, in economics, in 

[ 194 ] 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


ethics, and in art, a definite and categorical 
return to the old paganism. It is argued, 
and may be debatable, that such a return 
was an evidence of human evolution toward 
something higher and more wholesome than 
Christianity could afford. It may be so, but 
the eternal antithesis must be recognized 
and men must now admit that society can 
no longer continue half Christian and half 
pagan. With more than exemplary patience 
Christianity has surrendered one position 
after another in the vain effort to affect a 
compromise and maintain a working basis 
with the universal force that re-entered the 
world just five centuries ago. The result 
is now for us to see in the elapsed years of 
the twentieth century, made clear and un- 
mistakable by the events that have cast the 
ted light of their apocalyptic revelation 
over the delusive present, ever since the 
first day of August in the year of Our 
Lord, One Thousand Nine Hundred and 
Fourteen. 

There remain for us only a few words as 
to the workings of this new paganism in the 
architecture that in seven centuries had 
grown from the hesitating efforts of Charle- 
-magne’s clumsy builders to the awful maj- 


[ 195 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


esty of Chartres, the kindly and human and 
beautiful Lincoln, the serene consummation 
of Rheims. It was at first a stimulus, for 
the high ardour of Medizvalism was still 
there, and it used the delicacy and the craft 
and the pleasant fancy of the earliest Renais- 
Sance to give a new charm to its own im- 
aginings. Then came the division of society 
between capitalist and proletarian, the con- 
centration of wealth and the means to 
wealth in a few hands, the dissolution of 
the guilds, the suppression of the monas- 
teries, the restoration of tyranny and abso- 
lutism in government, the moral apostasy 
of the Church. Intellectualism took the 
place of conscience and Revelation; indi- 
vidualism destroyed liberty and co-opera- 
tion, and all the mainsprings of communal 
art were dried up. 

For the art of the Middle Ages was a 
communal art, and in this may lie the secret 
of its character. It grew from the spon- 
taneous demand of a whole people under 
the influence of a great and vital impulse. 
No beneficent millionaire, no Brahmin of 
superior taste, no august and official acad- 
emy, no suddenly enriched middle class 
with social ambitions gave the call or dic- 

[ 196 ] 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


tated the forms or the fashions they would 
patronize. There were no architects as 
such, and no contractors; no vast and efh- 
cient building organizations on the one 
hand, or industrious walking delegates on 
the other. No man stood by himself on a 
pinnacle of superiority and by competitive 
bids chose the cheapest workmen, dictated 
to them what they should do, and, subject 
to the veto of the labour unions, saw that 
they did it. Medieval architecture was the 
work of free, proud, independent artists and 
craftsmen, working together, each in his own 
sphere, and all to the common end of pro- 
ducing something better and more beauti- 
ful than had ever been seen before. 

The moment the Early Renaissance be- 
came the Pagan Renaissance, all this was 
changed. The new art was the appanage 
of the specialist: the people as a whole did 
not like it or want it, the craftsmen knew 
nothing about it and cared less. From its 
very nature it excluded personal artistry 
and individual initiative, and nothing re- 
mained, if the work was to be accomplished, 
but the invention of the architect. He was 
invented out of the amateurs and dilettanti 
of the literary circles of Italy and began 


(197 } 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


his career of designing, controlling, direct- 
ing every branch of an art that in its great 
days was not the result of an esthetic fiat, 
but of the co-operation of as many artists 
as there were arts, as many craftsmen as 
there were crafts. The guilds dissolved, 
craftsmanship died of disuse, classical de- 
tails, carefully drawn for day labourers to 
cut, worked their way fantastically into the 
lingering Gothic compositions, crowded 
them out, and established themselves as the 
exclusive claimants to the admiration of the 
elect. 

And still the old inheritance of good taste 
and the love of beauty and joy in craftsman- 
ship lingered here and there: the real and 
fine principles of the old classic architec- 
ture worked through the silly admiration 
of superficial forms and built up a new style 
that often reached levels of great majesty 
and distinguished beauty. But it was now 
a new style, and could only be this in com- 
mon honesty, for the life and thought to 
which it gave expression were equally 
new. It is inconceivable that the art of the 
Middle Ages could have continued to voice 
the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the 
Revolution, and to give outward shape to 

[ 198 ] 


DECADENCE AND NEW PAGANISM 


the spirit of the Capitalistic and Industrial 
State which is the synthesis of these, the 
solar plexus of modernism. Gothic art had 
done its work; it had given immortal form 
to Christian civilization, and it passed with 
the splendid thing it had so faithfully 
served. It can never come back, at least 
with the life and power that were its own. 
Haltingly restored it may serve well as the 
visible protest of the Church and the uni- 
versity against their eternal enemy, the new 
paganism. Whether its spirit comes back, 
to express, in some new series of forms, the 
righteous and eternal forces that made the 
Medieval man and the Medieval State, 
depends on the answer the world gives to 
the great question propounded by the War. 

We have had our chance and have made 
of it— what we have made. Modern civi- 
lization has now reached that impasse from 
which the way of escape is apparently by 
way of war. Revolution follows close; it 
may be that the war itself will merge in 
revolution with no military termination that 
finds its position in a treaty of peace, while 
the inevitable process of overturning the 
entire economic and industrial basis of so- 
ciety supersedes a war of armed forces and 

[ 199 | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


brings in the more terrible contest of classes 
and of systems. No prediction is plausible 
except that, whether now or later, the revo- 
lution is not to be escaped and that in the 
end all we have known as modern civiliza- 
tion will have passed and a new era have 
come into being. 

The new paganism has had its era of five 
centuries and no definite epoch has ever 
lasted beyond this period. The end is very 
close at hand; whether the next step is into 
five centuries ‘of Dark Ages or into a new 
era of five centuries of a restored Chris- 
tian commonwealth, depends on us. The 
choice is free; we are not constrained in our 
decision, but on that decision hangs the hap- 
piness or misery, the honour or the shame, 
the righteousness or the apostasy of the 
world. Men rejected Christian civiliza- 
tion for the new paganism once, when the 
choice was offered them. Will they now 
in turn reject their former choice that the 
Christian commonwealth may be restored? 


[ 200 ] 


~CONCLUSION 


WHAT WAS MEDIAVAL 
CIVILIZATION? 


THERE is a connotation of impertinence 
in the effort of any one man to answer such 
a question, particularly within the limits 
of a single article: the subject is so large, 
so inclusive, withal so puzzling in its vari- 
eties and its apparent contradictions that 
it is really matter for a symposium rather 
than an essay. Then again there are so 
many lines of approach, the aspects are so 
various, there is such an infinity of alluring 
bypaths beguiling the feet that one hesitates 
to attempt a synthesis. After all, however, 
are the Middle Ages widely different from 
any other in this respect? For a century or 
two it has been rather the fashion to fix an 
epithet on a time, some descriptive phrase 
that, like the old definition of an epigram, 
is ‘short, false, and conclusive”’ and exalts 
or-damns by its isolation of one. salient 


[ 201 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


quality, ignoring the many others that 
mitigate the circumstances of a facile 
specialization. 

Medievalism has suffered signally from 
this method of estimate for it was bewilder- 
ingly varied in its manifestations, while its 
vivid élan vital gave each one a brilliancy of 
presentation that blinds the commentator 
to all others except the one to which, by in- 
heritance and acquired prejudice, he is pre- 
disposed. One exalts the amazing and per- 
fect arts of architecture, sculpture, stained 
glass, music; another the social system 
with its political, industrial, and economic 
aspects; to a third it is the era of a consum- 
mate philosophy and metaphysic; to a 
fourth a paradise of chivalry, adventure, 
and romance; while to a fifth it is the time 
when the Christian religion achieved its 
highest perfection in theory and in practise, 
and when it most perfectly directed the lives 
of the people to righteous ends. 

And out of this prodigal variety comes 
the opposed attitude of those who, hating 
some one salient characteristic, condemn 
the rest out of hand and damn a thousand 
years to ignominy and oblivion. So the 
classicist in art, finding ‘‘Gothic” distaste- 


[302 


WHAT WAS MEDIAVAL CIVILIZATION? 


ful, estimates an era by a single prejudice. 
The evolutionist follows suit and sneers at 
the scholastic or mystical philosophy he 
knows only by name. The pacifist revolts 
at the Crusades and tournaments and pri- 
vate wars, the Protestant shies at the very 
word “Catholic” and bolts incontinently 
into some alphabetical society of mystery 
and awe, while the industrial and financial 
magnates, the “go-getters’’ and the ad- 
vertizing experts, appalled at the naiveté 
and delicate scale of Medieval society with 
its ludicrous lack of science and efficiency, 
consign the iridescent millennium to the 
category that enshrines the mythical stone 
age, the cave man, and the sabre-toothed 
tiger. 

One and all they fall back on a single 
sufficiently descriptive and comprehensively 
damnatory epithet, joining themselves with 
journalists, scientists, teachers of history, 
Protestant preachers, and other earnest but 
imperfectly informed people, and with an 
assured contentment use the words “The 
Dark Ages” and “ Medizvalism”’ as inter- 
changeable terms of apt and conclusive 
description. 

Well, the term is appropriate, perhaps, 


[ 203 J 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


when applied to the major part of Europe 
from the fall-of the Roman Empire until 
the year 1000, when one has regard to the 
splendour that preceded and the glory that 
followed on, though even in this restricted 
sense it is hardly true of Ireland and the 
Iberian Peninsula where there was a very 
real civilization of considerable luminosity, 
— Celtic, Visigoth, and Moorish, — while 
the darkness of destruction and dim begin- 
nings lay over the rest of Europe. All the 
same, even if we use the word here in a rough 
generalization, it is excluded from propriety 
when we come to deal with the five cen- 
turies that followed and that are essentially 
the epoch of Medizvalism in the sense in 
which we conceive of the space of time when 
we try to estimate its inner nature and the 
contribution it has made to the cultural 
record of the world. As I say, the first five 
hundred years after the fall of the Empire 
were quite given over to making a choice 
collection of ruins, cleaning away the débris, 
and purifying a soil corrupt with old poisons, 
together with the fertilizing of this regen- 
erated soil for new gardens, and the laying 
of solid foundations for more stately man- 
sions for the emancipated soul of Europe. 


[ 204 ] 





An Encutsu Parish CHuRcCH, CHIPPING CAMPDEN 


XVI. 


ws 


a 





WHAT WAS MEDIAVAL CIVILIZATION? 


It was not a nice time in any particular 
respect, though probably less bad than it is 
painted, but it did its work well, and when 
the signal was given about the middle of the 
tenth century the world fell-to with a will, 
and the New Jerusalem of Christian civili- 
zation began to rise with disconcerting im- 
petuosity. Within fifty years Medievalism 
was functioning with power and it continued 
progressively for three centuries, when it 
paused on a sort of dead centre and then 
slowly declined in energy and quality, dis- 
appearing altogether from its last strong- 
holds, England and Spain, by the year 1600, 
the renaissance of pagan civilization and 
Hebraic theology (unhandy juxtaposition) 
taking its place. It is this period of about 
five hundred years whose “essence’’ we 
are called upon to estimate. 

Such a process takes on of necessity a 
certain quality of special pleading. The 
temptation is great to “claim everything,” 
and the very variety of the Medieval ex- 
pression is an added incentive. The same 
thing held in the case of the Renaissance 
which even now is held by a certain “Old 
Guard” to represent all there is in life of the 
praiseworthy and the august. It held in the 


[ 205 J 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


case of the Reformation; it held in the case 
of “modern civilization”’ until the War, and 
even more the ensuing “Peace,” brought 
certain unwelcome revisions of judgment. 
I have been something of a special-pleader 
myself (not dishonestly I hope) in the case 
of Medievalism, but the light shines in un- 
expected places, and I would try here for a 
calmer and more judicial method. Aban- 
doning then for the moment the undeniable 
and supremely logical fascination that lies 
in the defense of lost causes (the majority 
of those so lost were right, were they not?), 
let us see if we can estimate with caution and 
reserve the essence of the cultural contribu- 
tion of Medievalism. 

I spoke at the outset of the bewildering 
variety of the phenomena which had issued 
out of the epoch we call the Middle Ages, 
a variety equaled only by Hellenic civiliza- 
tion and modernism. Consider for a mo- 
ment the field that is covered. Most sali- 
ent, because of its high visibility, is Gothic 
art with its supreme architecture in the 
shape of cathedrals, monasteries, civic halls, 
fortresses, castles, bridges, manors, dwell- 
ings in town and country. Equally tri- 
umphant its sculpture which ranks, at its 


[ 206 | 


WHAT WAS MEDIAEVAL CIVILIZATION? 


best, with that of Greece; its stained glass 
(a new art altogether), its exquisite metal 
work, wood carving, enamels, tapestry, 
needlework; its music, the basis of all we 
have had since, its epic and lyric poetry, and 
its high romance. Altogether one of the 
three great art epochs the world has known, 
and in the estimation of many second to 
none. Equally organic, vital, and original 
was the philosophical system expounded by 
masters like Hugh of St. Victor, Duns 
Scotus, Albertus Magnus, John of Salisbury, 
St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, sup- 
plemented and perfected by such mysticism 
as that of St. John of the Cross and Santa 
Teresa. Closely allied was the educational 
foundation with its cathedral and monastic 
schools and its sequence of great universities 
in every country in Europe, the first con- 
sistent plan of education in history and the 
source from which all our schools and 
colleges derive. 

Even more amazing was the development 
of the political idea from the Vizigothic 
Forum “fudicum of fifth-century Spain 
through Magna Charta, and the Constitu- 
tions of Clarendon and Bracton’s De Legibus 
to the most admirable Assizes of Jerusalem 


[ 207 | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


of the thirteenth century, the latter an al- 
most complete revelation of the principles 
of free, enlightened, and righteous govern- 
ment on which (as yet insufficiently) our 
modern system of law and government is 
founded. Whatever we have of true liberty 
and order in the governmental sense is based 
not on our dim and distorted classical her- 
itage, but on the clear vision and the crea- 
tive thought of the monks and the guilds 
and the commons of the Middle Ages. 
And this opens up another wide field of re- 
vealing theory and constructive action, — 
the social and economic system of the period. 
Feudalism was forced by the exigencies of 
the time, as a working method, but it was 
vitalized and perpetuated by the interpre- 
tation given it, and the lofty character as 
well, by the men of the time who made it 
their duty to translate an accomplished and 
material fact into a dynamic ideal. The 
doctrine of mutual aid and corresponding, 
reciprocal obligations, with the supremacy 
of custom or common law and the subjection 
of all executive, legislative, and judicial 
acts to divinely revealed moral principles, 
and the institution of status in lieu of caste, 
together made up a body of fundamental 


[ 208 | 


WHAT WAS MEDIAVAL CIVILIZATION? 


law of singular cogency and force and 
formed at least an ideal which was steadily 
aimed at, and perhaps as frequently 
achieved as in more recent times. 

In close association with this institution 
grew up the economic system of merchant-, 
trade-, and craft-guilds, an organism so 
simple, just, and effective that to-day we 
are turning to it for the purpose of finding 
out if here may not lie the solution of our 
own pressing industrial, economic, and social 
problems which thus far have baffled solu- 
tion in proportion as they threaten the con- 
tinuance of civilization itself. So also came 
Chivalry, following after the Crusades, — 
they themselves no negligible contribution, 
in their theory, at all events, and the ideals 
they incited; —Chivalry with its shining 
principles (again not always attained) of 
loyalty, self-sacrifice, service, generosity, 
hardihood, adventure, and the defense of 
women. It was an institution, or rather a 
scheme of existence, high-flown, measurably 
artificial, impossible of frequent achieve- 
ment, but nevertheless, in its later days 
of the troubadours and courts of love 
and Le Roi René, shot through and 
through with idealism, and manifesting 


[ 209 J 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


itself in terms of beauty like a midsummer 
dream. 

Then what shall we say of the religion of 
the time when Christianity attained its 
most personal, poignant, and pervasive 
form? It is a contentious subject, and the 
very words “‘ Medieval Catholicism” rouse, 
even now, rage and blind resentment, 
largely, I should suppose, because the critics 
and assailants have not the least idea what 
it was, having come in contact with it only 
through formal histories or what are plaus- 
ibly denominated “‘original sources.”’ Well, 
at least it was beautiful, one of the most 
beautiful things man has ever experienced, 
and I have never heard that the same attri- 
bute has ever been alleged of Calvinism, 
Puritanism, or any other of the substitutes 
that have taken its place. 

Now there is ground for maintaining that 
nothing is true that is not beautiful (an 
opinion to which I personally incline), and 
if this contention is established, then these 
same modern substitutes for Medizval 
religion fall to the ground. The point is 
not essential to the present argument and 
is only interesting as a plausible deduction. 
The fact remains that the great contribution 


[ 210 | 


WHAT WAS MEDIAVAL CIVILIZATION? 


of the Middle Ages to religion was radiant 
beauty, and the people of that time so loved 
beauty (as do all normal and civilized in- 
dividuals and communities) that the beau- 
tifying of religion became a passion even 
more compelling than the present passion 
for ‘‘beautifying”’ cities, while the thing so 
adorned was taken whole-heartedly into 
their lives and for good or ill interpenetrated 
them from the cradle to the grave — and 
after. For once religion came down from 
heaven and became human, the saints were 
friends, neighbours, chums even, in a manner 
of speaking. The dead were neither lost, 
forgotten, nor abandoned to the tender 
mercies (or otherwise) of abstract and awful 
Omnipotence; they lived, as ever, only 
differently. Our Lady, Queen of Heaven, 
was the eternal Mother of every erring 
child, and mercy, comprehension, interces- 
sion to forgiveness, were hers in secula 
seculorum. And then philosophy, elabo- 
rating and applying the original deposit of 
sacramental truth, gave significance and 
something of sacramental character to 
everything in nature and life, building up 
the tangible symbols and media of spiritual 
 verities until men had something to take 


(part | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


hold of at every turn, while the great art of 
liturgics created a series of beautiful forms, 
and an equally beautiful mise-en-scéne for 
their presentation, so that it is little wonder 
that religion achieved a new life and smote 
itself into human living as never before. 

So here are five or six explicit marks by 
which we may identify Medievalism, di- 
verse contributions to the cultural content 
of the world. As I have said, each of them 
may be, and by one or another has been, 
proclaimed as its essence, its distinguishing 
and unique endowment of civilization. For 
my own part I do not think I should fix on 
any one in this sense, enduringly valuable 
as they all are; instead I should be inclined 
to find the essence of Medizvalism in the 
synthesis of these varied manifestations and 
define it as the sense of balance in life 
and the determining of true values in their 
proper order. : 

In this respect the Middle Ages were the 
antithesis of our own, and herein lies their 
usefulness for us to-day. Modernism, in the 
historic, not the theological sense (though 
the distinction is not imperative), finds its 
fatal weakness in just this loss of sense of 
balance and its “‘transvaluation of values,” 


Ate 


WHAT WAS MEDIZAVAL CIVILIZATION? 


and the endless and infinitely diverse criti- 
cisms that are now pouring upon it in a 
rushing stream may all find their justifica- 
tion in this fact. 

To assert that the Middle Ages were 
characterized by just balance and a sense 
of right values is to court derision, but my 
best judgment is that itisafact. It is hard 
to believe that the wonders of art, learning, 
piety, and character, that remain to us from 
that time, and for multitude and quality 
are almost without rival, could have issued 
out of a system of society less admirably 
conceived and organized. Apart from this, 
however, which may not be accepted as con- 
clusive proof, a study of Medieval political, 
economic, social, philosophical, and religious 
theory reveals extraordinary clarity of 
thought and an equally notable combina- 
tion and interplay of these various spiritual 
energies. Nor was the working out in 
practise without considerable success. Of 
course there always has been and always 
will be a great gulf between practise and 
theory, for the latter is the product of the 
few, the former the work of the many and, 
““democractic”’ theory to the contrary not- 
withstanding, the dilution and degradation 


[ 213 ] 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


in process is the inescapable nemesis. 
Medieval practise frequently failed to live 
up to Medieval precept, in which respect 
it shares with universal history, but a fair 
judgment will concede that its shortcomings 
were no greater than in other instances. It 
is easy to exalt a period of history or to con- 
demn, depending on whether you take testi- 
mony from one side or the other, for there 
are always two sides, two forces, one work- 
ing towards righteousness, the other to- 
wards evil, just as in the case of man 
himself. There was cruelty in the Middle 
Ages as there is now; there were selfishness, 
ignorance, immorality, pride, hypocrisy, as 
there have been always, and, I suppose, 
always will be. On the other hand, there 
were some of the noblest manifestations of 
character ever recorded, and some of the 
greatest triumphs of intellect, creative emo- 
tion, and constructive action. The evils of 
the time have been equaled or exceeded 
during the past ten years, its virtues have, 
I submit, scarcely found their rivals within 
the same decade or, for that matter, the 
century that went before. 

All this however is beside the point; these 
sharp antitheses always are, and it may be 


[ 214 ] 


WHAT WAS MEDIAVAL CIVILIZATION? 


that we lack perspective to enable us tojudge 
justly as to comparative levels of achieve- 
ment. The point is that in the period under 
consideration there was an unusual degree 
of consistency in the current scheme of life. 
All those factors that go to the make-up of 
well-rounded existence were recognized and 
accepted. Religion, philosophy, adventure, 
romance, fighting, charity, work and play, 
all entered into the synthesis with, gener- 
ally speaking, no undue emphasis placed on 
one to the degradation or exclusion of 
others. The whole world did not throw 
itself bodily into the successive pursuit of 
political power, political license, intellectual 
license, territorial conquest, industrial de- 
velopment, financial omnipotence, scientific 
discovery, social anarchy, as it has done 
since. Instead, all the factors of life played 
one against the other, correcting excesses, in- 
citing toemulation. There was no high spe- 
cialization, with life divided into water-tight 
compartments each sufficient to itself and 
into which none but the initiated could 
enter. Religion had its say in determining 
economic, industrial, and political condi- 
tions; government was influenced by philo- 
sophical and labour considerations; beauty 


L215 | 


THE SUBSTANCE OF GOTHIC 


was a valid test of religion; romance and 
chivalry and charity criteria of life itself. 
Indeed everything was in a way very much 
mixed up, but there was less of confusion 
resulting from this than there was order and 
sanity and a healthy joy in life. Finally, 
body and spirit were equally realized and 
accepted. There was no abandonment to a 
sterile Puritanism on the one hand or toa 
futile hedonism on the other. Man was a 
fine animal in one respect, but he was also 
a living spirit “made in the Image of God.” 
Both parts he played naturally, bravely, 
and with undaunted ardour and a very sav- 
ing sense of humour. 

Sense of balance in life and the determin- 
ing of true values in their proper order: this 
then seems to me the essence of Medizval- 
ism. And it is just these qualities that 
make it valuable to us to-day as a test, a 
guide, and an inspiration, for it is in just 
these respects that modern civilization shows 
itself weakest. 


[ 216 ] 





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